


Camp

by bjfic_archivist



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-06-06
Updated: 2005-06-06
Packaged: 2018-12-26 18:27:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 27,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12064587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bjfic_archivist/pseuds/bjfic_archivist
Summary: Didn't you have a crush on your camp counselor?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Note from IrishCaelan, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Brian/Justin Fanfiction Archive](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Brian_Justin_Fanfiction_Archive). To preserve the archive, I began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in September 2017. I posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [The Brian/Justin Fanfiction Archive collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/bjfic/profile).

Note: I greatly reduced the age difference in order to make it the slightest bit plausible that Brian and Justin would be at the same summer camp (while of a not completely appalling age for sex). Brian and Michael are 19; Justin and Daphne are 15.

* * *

When Michael had talked Brian into being a counselor at Camp Greenaway, he had dwelled heavily on the freedom from parents, the proximity to new hot guys, and the comparative ease of camp work compared with stocking the shelves at Lowe’s, which was what they’d done last summer. Also the guilt: “Now that we’re at different colleges I never *see* you anymore.” He had skated over the 24-hour supervision of noisy, whiny, filthy rich brats. Now, looking at the long line of SUVs disgorging screaming blond children, Brian was disgusted with himself for letting Mikey suck him into this. He ground out his cigarette and headed back up to the gym, where the brats were heading to be sorted into their cabins. Of course, Michael had been looking for him.

“There you are! We’re over here. Blackfoot and Croatan. You’ve already got some kids. Here’s your clipboard, just check them off.”

“Hellooo, happy campers,” Brian said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Who are you?” He dutifully checked in Hobbs, Chris; Perry, James; and Radziwill, Ryan. Slowly, his other charges trickled in, pushed and pulled by sweaty, harried parents. “But I want a top bunk!” a high voice wailed across the gym. At least he and Michael had, due to minor intimidation on Brian’s part, drawn the 15-year-olds. The youngest kids at Greenaway were 7, and they looked to be barely out of diapers. The Blackfeet and Croatans were short and scrawny and some of them looked resentful, but at least they probably wouldn’t need their asses wiped.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Is this Blackfoot?” a big-eyed blond woman asked politely. 

“Nope, Mikey’s got Blackfoot. Mikey!”

Michael glared at him. “Yes, ma’am?”

She dragged a white-blond kid forward. He looked annoyed. “Mom, I can sign myself in,” he said in an undertone. “I was talking to Daph.”

“This is Justin Taylor. He’s in Blackfoot this year.”

“Hi, Justin. I’m Michael,” Michael said eagerly.

Someone else tapped Brian’s shoulder and he turned away.

***

While Justin was waiting, bored, with the other Blackfeet, his eyes fixed on the Croatan counselor, who unlike the other perky counselors was leaning against the wall also looking bored. Tall, muscular, glossy chestnut hair, already tan and wearing sunglasses even in the artificial light of the gym. *Maybe he’s high,* Justin thought. *Jesus, he’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. I wish I were in his cabin. I’d like to see HIM in the shower.* Justin was 99.9% sure he was gay, based on the way all his fantasies revolved around naked men and his complete failure to develop an interest in Amanda March’s admittedly enormous breasts. But it wasn’t like he’d tried it out. He had a feeling that the St. James locker room was not the safest place to explore your queerness. Camp, though--camp would be perfect. Campouts, fires to lurk around the edges of, acres of woods, no parents, and most importantly, lots of guys he would never see again.

***

Parts of camp, like reveille and cabin clean-up, resembled Brian’s picture of the military, a place he’d always planned to stay well clear of. Parts of it, like teaching soccer, were kind of fun. He knew enough to give legitimate coaching advice, the kids weren’t bad (probably their mommies had been carting them to soccer practice ever since they could toddle), and one day when he praised this kid Chris for his footwork, the kid smiled like he’d given him a sundae. Also, the other teacher was a reasonably attractive guy who’d looked Brian over with clear interest on day one, and Brian expected to have no trouble getting him on his knees. 

The problem with soccer was that he’d rather be playing it than teaching it. This was also the problem with climbing.

Brian, Michael, and a guy named Todd who was the only one who really knew what he was doing were teaching climbing. Todd was tall and toned, but unfortunately he appeared to be straight as a razor blade. They had twelve brats in their class, which was a lot to keep from falling off a cliff, but so far they were just taking turns climbing walls in the gym. Some of the walls were tilted out so you had to hold on hanging practically upside down. During training Brian had proved to be much better at it than Michael (no surprise), although Todd said if he kept relying on his upper body strength like that he would never develop any technique. Brian didn’t particularly care about technique--he just wanted to get up the damn wall. 

Annoyingly, some of the brats shimmied up all the walls with ease, particularly the tiniest ones, who Todd explained had an excellent strength-to-weight ratio. There was also this blond kid in Michael’s cabin who could put his toes up by his ear and then stand up on them. It probably helped that he was short--also that he been coming to Greenaway lo these many years, on top of which his father took him climbing outdoors. He had a cute round ass, and Brian kind of liked to watch him snake up the wall. It was almost a shame that he wasn’t one of the lousy climbers who needed a counselor to put a hand up and support his ass to keep him from falling off when he got to an overhang. But he was just a kid, and when he wasn’t climbing he was giggling with a light-skinned black girl, probably talking about cartoons or something.

***

“He’s hot,” Daphne said, nodding at Brian, the Croatan counselor, who was squatting to fix some little girl’s harness.

“Uh...”

“Like I could have missed your tongue hanging out, Justin.”

“Yeah, okay, he’s hot. Anyone can see that.”

“And yet, a gay boy can probably see it easier than a straight boy.”

Justin squeezed his eyes shut. “Daph...I was gonna tell you. I sort of wanted to wait until I knew for sure. Like a hundred percent sure.”

“It’s okay, Justin,” she said softly. Actually, she looked a little bit deflated. “I know you would have told me eventually.” She looked at Brian again and started to grin again, in her wonderful Daphne way, showing all her straight little white teeth. “You want him, don’t you? We need a plan. Maybe we can get you to, like, fall on him.”

“I don’t want to fall on him!” Justin protested. “I want to be *cool.* Cool and adult and sexy.”

“Mmm, I think Brian’s got all the cool and adult and sexy in the room.”

“Anyway he’s probably straight.”

“If you fell on him you might find out.”

***

But that wasn’t what happened. What happened was that Justin got halfway to swim class, realized he’d forgotten his towel, went back to the cabin, and walked in on Brian fucking the Shawnee counselor in the shower.

He only got a glimpse before he gasped “Sorry!” and hurried out, but on his towelless way to swim class he found himself entirely able to reconstruct the picture of the long muscles in Brian’s dark thighs, his closed eyes and open mouth, his comparatively pale ass clenching and releasing as he pumped in and out of the Shawnee counselor, a tall Asian guy whose arms were braced against the tile. He wondered why they were in the Blackfoot shower. There must have been someone actually showering in the Croatan cabin next door. Thinking about it, Justin slowed down, stopped, sat down under a tree and worked a hand into his shorts. He could be late for swim class.

***

“Who the fuck walked in?” Brian asked Eric, leaning boneless against his back for a second before pulling out.

Eric shook his head, still breathing hard. “Real blond kid.”

“Shit,” Brian said.

“Next time we do it in the woods.”

“That’s just what I need, ticks up my ass.” He’d already fucked Eric twice, which was plenty. More than twice and guys started to think you owed them something. He wondered whether he should talk to Michael’s blond brat. Probably the kid wasn’t enough of a tattletale to report them to camp management, which could be a financial disaster, but Brian also didn’t want to deal with a lot of snickering and fag jokes behind his back.

He caught up with the blond kid behind the dining hall that night. Even in this WASPy a crowd, his hair stood out like a beacon. Brian grabbed his shoulder and the kid turned around.

“What?” he asked, startled.

“You walked in on me and Eric in the shower.”

“Yeah...”

“You have any problems with that?”

The kid looked confused. “No.”

“I’d rather you didn’t tell all your little pals about it.” Brian felt like shit. If he’d been fucking a girl in the shower he would not be bothering to have this conversation. One day he was going to be so rich, so accomplished, so untouchable that no one would give a damn whether he fucked guys across his desk. And he was never taking another job that involved sniggering, gossipy adolescents.

“I won’t.”

Brian let go of him. “What’s your name?” he asked, in an effort to seem less threatening, since it looked like the kid might keep his mouth shut.

“Justin. I’m in your climbing class.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re good.”

“Thanks,” Justin said, and he smiled this big open smile, a happier smile than Brian had probably ever smiled in his entire life.

Brian walked away, but when he looked back over his shoulder, Justin was still standing there, looking at him and smiling.


	2. Camp

It was movie night. E.T. was playing, and Justin and Daphne were sitting on one sleeping bag on the far end of one row in the gym, sharing M&Ms. Justin had started getting teased about all the time he spent with Daphne, and was she his girlfriend, and how far had he gotten, and how was she? (Chris Hobbs was such a jackass, and it sucked that he was taller than Justin this year.) But all the older cabins intermingled during movies, and he was glad he had someone to sit with. Not just someone, but a pretty girl. One of these days that guy Matt she’d been flirting with would do something other than blush and duck his head, and then Justin’s single status would become embarrassingly clear.

“So Daph, you absolutely cannot tell anyone else about this, okay? Swear.”

“Swear!” Daphne said immediately, putting a hand up like she was swearing an oath in court.

“Brian Kinney is definitely not straight,” Justin said with satisfaction.

“How do you know?” she asked, all agog.

“I walked in on him fucking that counselor from Shawnee, the Asian one.”

“Eric. I have him for drama. Oh my God! We really do need a plan!”

“Well, it kind of looks like he has someone already.”

“What did it look like?”

“Hot. Very hot. And...kind of like a lot of work,” he said, vividly remembering the sweat on Brian’s back.

“Boys are notoriously fickle. And you’re a lot cuter than Eric. I totally think you have a chance.”

“Eric’s like three feet taller than me.”

Daphne rolled her eyes. “I do not want to have to tell you how gorgeous you are. Just assume I already did.”

The climbing classes always took an overnight trip to some real cliffs. Not the real little kids, but everyone ten and up. The place wasn’t as cool as the Gunks, where Justin had been once with his father, but it was still a nice place, and it was always good to have that break in the camp routine. No vespers, no reveille, no lines in the dining hall--just a dozen or so people with tents and camp stoves. They would pack out to a campsite one night, get in a full day of climbing, camp another night, and pack out the next morning, sweaty and dirty and sore. 

Of course, Daphne had to share a tent with other girls, and this year Justin had to share a tent with Matt and a couple of 12- or 13-year-olds. He looked longingly toward the counselors’ tent. Todd was industriously pounding stakes into the ground, and Michael had been helping him until Brian gestured him over, slung an arm around his neck, and passed him a joint out of his mouth. Justin wondered whether Michael and Brian were fucking. They touched each other a lot, but somehow Justin thought they weren’t. Brian had the joint back in his mouth, but then he leaned in and touched Michael’s lips with his, with the joint between them in both their mouths. Well, shit, maybe they were fucking. Brian was being awfully cavalier about the touching and the kissing for someone who didn’t want the campers to know he was gay. Justin suspected his Nalgene bottle contained something other than water. He was going to regret that when he got dehydrated. Of course, Justin was paying closer attention than anyone else, and it was practically dark anyway. It was just that for him, Brian stood out like he’d been spotlighted.

***

Brian deeply regretted signing up to teach climbing. The regular camp, with its cabins and bunk beds and communal showers, was already too rustic for him, and he had never missed the thumping bass of Babylon more than when he was surrounded by frogs and crickets. Backpacking was untenable. Clearly he was going to get ticks up his ass (and nothing else, considering who was going). Thank God he was in decent shape, so he wasn’t too pained by carrying a four-person tent, a huge heap of climbing gear, and enough water for a small army on his back into the wilderness. Mikey had been breathing hard and falling behind until one of the little girls twisted her ankle, which slowed their progress considerably. 

And now here they were, in the middle of fucking nowhere: fifteen brats, Todd, Mikey, Brian, and this very buff girl Katherine he would think was a dyke if she didn’t keep laughing at his stupid jokes. Of course it was dark already, and they hadn’t made dinner yet, and the kids were whining. Todd and Katherine, who clearly weren’t city kids, built a fire while Michael handed out oatmeal cookies to the brats who were complaining they would starve to death. Then they all roasted hot dogs. There was a lot of yelling about rhododendrons, and how the branches would poison you, and everyone had to get their roasting branches checked out. Katherine was happy to show Brian the difference between a rhodedendron branch and an anything else branch. Brian was at that point like to a ravening wolf and ate four hot dogs, and only after the third one did he slide his hot dog in and out of his mouth to tease Mikey. He passed Mikey the Nalgene bottle containing vodka and tonic.

“Can I have some?” piped the kid on his other side. It was the blond kid, Justin.

“What the fuck,” Brian said, and passed it to him. “Go easy on it.”

Todd, who was a real team spirit sort, attempted to lead the group in singing “Light one candle.” Brian sat back in the dark, far from the fire, and kept his mouth shut. Mikey started giggling. Justin sprawled on his back and tugged on Brian’s elbow, and when Brian let himself fall back next to him, he started pointing out constellations. 

“There’s the Big Dipper,” he said. “And there’s the North Star. And there’s Orion. Do you know the story of Orion? He was a hunter, and the goddess of the hunt was in love with him...”

“Give the vodka back,” Brian said, joking, because he had never heard the kid talk so much, but actually there was something soothing about his voice, and Brian was really fucking tired. He closed his eyes and let the legend of Orion and “Light one candle” wash over him. But then Todd finished his song and they had to round the kids up and put them in their proper, sex-segregated tents (which Brian hoped were handy for any blossoming queers), and then he was alone in his sleeping bag with Mikey zonked out next to him. He kissed the back of Mikey’s neck and settled in for the night.

He woke to the sound of retching, which sounded like it was happening right next to, possibly on top of, his ear. He rolled over, realized he had to piss, and got up. It was fucking cold outside for the middle of summer, and he was only wearing underwear. Of course it was Justin puking. He should never have handed the vodka over to the brat. Brian went off and pissed against a tree, and when he turned around Justin was looking at him.

“You’ll be fine,” Brian said. “Drink some water.”

Justin nodded, jerkily. He was wearing all his clothes, looking cold and miserable, and Brian had an obscure urge to hug him, so he went over and rubbed his shoulder.

“You have water?”

Justin nodded.

“See you in the morning,” Brian said, and went back to his tent. Justin was still standing there when he crawled in.

***

*Fuck fuck fuck,* Justin thought. *Way to make a good impression on the gorgeous, nearly naked man.* He located his pack, drank some water, brushed his teeth, and eased back into his sleeping bag. 

***

After losing a brief argument, Brian and Michael split up the next day and went to different cliff sites, since Todd and Katherine were the more experienced trip leaders. Stretched out over the edge of the rock to set an anchor, Brian seriously hoped that Michael didn’t fall off a cliff without him. Next to him, Justin expertly set a back-up anchor by tying webbing around a tree. Justin, who if he was hungover was hiding it well (maybe he’d thrown up most of the vodka) had volunteered to help Brian set the top-rope anchors, and Brian was silently grateful because this enabled him to set his anchors as fast as Todd. Justin and his friend Daphne also scampered about helpfully checking the littler kids’ harnesses--after two weeks of lessons some of them still couldn’t figure out where their legs went.

Brian had never climbed an actual rock before, and after the kids had done the climb he’d set he got Justin to belay him. It was an easy one, with no overhangs and big irregularities in the rock, but it was a whole different thing from the gym. In the gym the brightly-colored plastic holds made it clear where you were supposed to put your hands and feet, even if you couldn’t imagine how to get your hands or feet up that far. On the rock it required a little thought. He liked it. He thought he’d like to try a really hard one. On the other hand he didn’t want to embarrass himself by falling in front of the kids. Justin had already run up the easy climb like it was nothing.

***

Apart from his headache, Justin was having a great time. He took his turn climbing, and then Brian asked for a belay and Justin got to stand there for some minutes with a perfect excuse for looking nowhere but at Brian’s ass. Mmm, nice. Daphne smirked at him. She and Matt had sat together by the fire last night, and Justin had just seen them sharing trail mix. She was perky even for Daphne.

Brian got to the top and yelled, “Down,” and Justin lowered him slowly. When Brian’s feet hit the ground he didn’t stand up on them, so Justin kept lowering him until Brian was lying on his back, spreadeagled on the ground, then unhooked his own anchor and pulled Brian up.

“Thanks,” Brian said, detaching himself from the rope.

When their group was done with the routes Brian and Todd had set, they traded off with the other group, and Katherine and Todd banded together to set an overhanging climb up the inside of an alcove in the cliff. Justin wasn’t at all sure he could do it. He was going to be really annoyed if some featherweight ten-year-old just scrambled up it. Matt got about halfway up it twice, but on the steep overhang his height was more a hindrance than a help. Anna, who was a little bit of a thing, also fell off five feet from the top. When you fell you swung away from the wall in an arc, so you ran a risk of hitting anyone stupid enough to stand too close, and you had to start over from the ground. Justin looked around to see whether Brian was watching, but he was belaying the next climb over. Well, maybe he didn’t want Brian watching him anyway. He stepped up and tied in.

The first couple of moves were fine, but the handholds weren’t very good at the bottom, and he’d already done three climbs that day, so his fingers were starting to give out. He succeeded in replacing his right hand with his right foot, swung his hand way the hell up, and caught the deep crack that made the route possible. Clutching it, locking his arm to reduce the strain, he took a deep breath and surveyed the rock ahead. Now he was practically on his back and it was mostly a matter of moving fast. He worked his feet up with more force than finesse, depending on the balls of his feet to stick to the little nibs of rock he put them on, and got both his hands in the crack. Once his left hand scrabbled on dirt and slipped, and he had to hold nearly his whole weight with his right arm for a few seconds until he got his left hand back in. The crack was getting too narrow for his hands. He looked down, moved his feet up as far as he could, jamming one foot in the wide base of the crack, held fast with his left hand, and reached for a jut of rock with his right as he stood up.

“Hold!” he yelled, and felt the rope tighten above him. He let go. “Down!” He let Todd lower him until his butt touched the ground, and lay down, smiling. His knuckles were bleeding and the heat on his face presaged sunburn, but he felt good. He sat up and unlaced his painfully tight climbing shoes before untying.

***

Brian was belaying a little curly-haired girl up a climb so easy it was almost a staircase, and his eyes wandered over to the new route. Justin was near the top and making rapid progress when one arm fell down, but instead of swinging out at that point, he held on and a minute later was standing at the apex of the route.

*I’d like to try that,* Brian thought. *Alone.* 

“Down!” came the shrill voice of the curly-haired girl.

On his other side, the boy Michael was belaying came down after not quite finishing a more difficult climb. Michael made a big deal about what a good job he had done and how much better he was doing now compared with the morning. Michael was good at this kind of thing. Brian was not. It was okay here, with the dappled sun on his face and his arms aching and nothing to do but pull kids up and down rocks. It did beat stocking shelves in the middle of the night. But he didn’t have most of the kids’ names straight, and although he could help them untie their figure-eight knots, he couldn’t bring himself to congratulate them on a job well done. Michael’s campers seemed to like him, even if they thought he was goofy. Brian was keeping his campers in line, but it wasn’t like they talked to him. Chris had come to him once proudly brandishing a sheet full of bulleyes from the shooting range, and Brian had said with false cheer, “Now you can have a prosperous career as a hitman,” and Chris had frowned and stopped showing him things. 

The curly-haired girl had untied and run over to bug Michael, ignoring Brian. *I am never having kids,* he thought. *Not that it’s going to be an issue.*

He saw Justin talking to his girlfriend, grinning and practically doing a little dance. “Did you see me? I got all the way up the overhang!”

“Aw, I missed it. That’s great, though. That’s so cool.” She lowered her voice, but Brian was pretty sure she said, “Did *Brian* see you?”

Justin hissed, “*Shut. Up.*”

Brian’s eyebrows rose.

***

Justin, who hadn’t looked at Brian since he started the climb but knew exactly where he was standing, pulled Daphne away from him.

“What about you and Matt, huh?”

She giggled. “He’s cool. Maybe not as good a climber as you, but...he’s done a lot of backpacking with his dad, real hard-core stuff where you have to filter your own water and no one could find you if a bear clawed you to death.”

“That’s what cell phones are for, stupid.”

“Mmm, I don’t think real outdoorsmen carry cell phones. I think the idea is to get away from it all.”

“I’m already totally regretting the lack of showers in the great outdoors. I reek. I think I’m a city boy.”

“Sweaty boys have their appeal.”

When everyone had run out of cereal bars and trail mix and climbed everything they were willing to try, the counselors started pulling the ropes. “Can we leave that up a little while?” Brian asked Todd. “Michael’s gonna belay me on it. We’ll just be a few minutes late back to camp.”

“Sure,” Todd said. “Take it down yourself. You guys can finish cleaning this site and we’ll go back to the first one.”

Hearing this exchange, Justin suddenly came up with a plan. A kernel of a plan.

“Daphne, I need you to desperately need Michael for something. Ideally something back at the camp.”

“I don’t even know Michael!”

“Daphne!”

“Okay. Okay.” A minute later she said, “I got it. I carried a rope in, but now I’ve hurt my ankle, I can’t carry it or my daypack back out and I need him to do it.”

“You go, girl.” Daphne was such a good friend. She limped over to Michael and Justin could hear him being a total pushover.


	3. Camp

Brian picked up all the gear lying around, reassigned it to children, and coiled the rope of the staircase climb before he called, “Mikey!”

Mikey scurried over, heavily laden.

“Mikey, belay me on this, okay? And then we can clean it.”

“I can’t, Brian,” he said regretfully. “I’ve got to take Daphne’s pack back for her, and this rope. I was about to leave.”

Brian’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Justin’s little friend standing in the background. She looked excessively innocent.

“Justin can belay you,” Michael suggested, as if they’d written the script for him, too. “He’s been belaying people all day.”

Justin materialized. “Sure, no problem,” he said brightly.

Brian would much rather have made a fool of himself in front of Mikey, who would worship the ground he walked on no matter what. Also, he strongly suspected a set-up. Maybe the pretty blond climber with the great ass had a little crush. But so what? He wanted to do the route, and the reasons he would rather have Mikey watching his back were not ones he cared to explain. “Okay, fine,” he said.

Michael and Daphne trundled off and Brian and Justin hooked themselves up to the rope. Brian stepped up to the wall and eyed it like it owed him money. 

Right at the beginning, where there really wasn’t much to hold onto, his right hand slipped and he fell back, but he caught himself on the left hand and toe and got back on the rock. Then, moving carefully, he got up without too much trouble to the part where his hands were in the fissure. Unfortunately, at this point he was hanging upside down in a position that would be comfortable for a mosquito. He tried to move his hands up one at a time, wedging his knuckles in. His legs were dead weight. He reached for a small knob with his right foot, missed, and swung out. Justin, who had been jerked toward the cliff by Brian’s greater weight, brought him back down without his asking and just stood there. Brian sighed. Michael would be so much easier to deal with right now. He always knew what Michael was thinking.

“I want to try that again, okay?”

“Sure. I’ve got you.”

He got it on the third try. His fingers hurt, and his knuckles hurt, and his feet were getting sore, but the beginning movements settled in his brain and then he got the right way to lean against the crack, so on the third time up there was only really the last move to conquer, the one that required him to bend his body like a pretzel. And he got it. He got his right leg up by his waist and put all his weight on it in order to get his right hand on the knob near the top bolt. He locked his fingers around it and looked down, at Justin’s white head.

When his feet settled on the blessed ground, Justin smiled at him. “Good job.”

“Not as good as you.”

“Sometimes it helps to be short and skinny. And I’ve been doing this a long time.” Justin reached over, took the figure-eight knot out of his cramped fingers, and started to undo it. Brian looked down at Justin’s hands, right by his stomach, almost touching him. Justin’s knuckles were all scraped up. “Really,” Justin said, “you got it fast.” He pulled the rope out of Brian’s harness and yanked it from the climb.

“I’ll go get the anchors,” Brian said.

“Wait a minute, I’ll come with you.”

So they walked up the path to the cliff top together in the dusk, and pulled the gear from the anchors and stuffed it in their packs. Justin took some of the gear, although he hadn’t had any in the morning, and Brian let him. Then it was dark, they were slapping at mosquitos, and Brian realized he hadn’t really paid attention when they walked to the climbing site from the tents.

“You know how to get back to camp?”

“Wasn’t it...” Justin looked around. “No, not really.”

“*Fuck.*” Brian pulled a cigarette and lighter out of a mesh pocket doubtless designed to hold more healthful items. “Want one?”

Justin hesitated but declined, perhaps figuring it would be more embarrassing to choke than to say no. They walked away from the cliff for a while, and the paths degenerated from a set of choices to a set of vague flattened areas where a non-lost person might have trodden on plants.

“This is idiotic,” Brian said a few minutes later. “We’re not going to find it tonight. I don’t even have a flashlight. You have a flashlight?”

“No.”

“Do you have water?”

“Yes.”

“Then I don’t think we’ll die.” He was hungry, but apart from that he was just as glad to be away from the rowdy children and Todd’s campfire songs. He unhooked his pack and set it down. Then something occurred to him, and he turned on the kid. “You would *not* pretend to be lost just to be alone with me, would you?” he demanded.

“No,” Justin said slowly. “Why would I do that?”

Brian turned away. “Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of little boys?”

“Fuck you! I am not a little boy. You were damn grateful to have me to haul your ass up that climb.” 

Brian backed the kid up until his pack hit a tree, loomed over him, and then looked down at Justin’s pale, scared, defiant face and realized he had nothing good to say. He sighed and ducked his head toward Justin’s. “Yeah, I was.” He picked his head up and leaned one hand on the tree. “Seriously, if you know the way back and you haven’t told me yet, I swear I will not get mad.”

“Yeah, I’m not placing any bets there.” Justin set his pack down. “Look...”

“Mmm hmm?” 

“I did. I did want to be alone with you. But I am very hungry right now, and I would love to find the camp where the food is, and I have no idea which way it is.”

Brian sat down on the ground. “Okay. I think I have a Powerbar or something.” He started rummaging through his pack, throwing all the climbing equipment in a heap to be worried about later. “And ta da! a nifty picnic blanket.” He tossed that out, located a Powerbar, a NutriGrain bar, three apples, and a nearly full water bottle. “No wonder my damn pack was so heavy.”

“That’s all the reaction I’m getting?”

All on its own, Brian’s voice dropped to its sultry register. “What kind of reaction were you looking for?”

“Never mind,” Justin chuffed, sitting down and pouncing on the NutriGrain bar. Brian put a hand on top of his.

“Half. I’m hungry, too.”

Justin glared but broke the bar in half. 

Ten minutes later all the food was gone and there had been no more conversation outside of variations on “gimme.” Justin picked up the picnic blanket and walked off.

“Where the fuck are you going?”

“To find a flat place,” he called back.

“Well, wait the hell up.” Brian got up, still chewing, scooped up the water bottles and cigarettes, and followed his voice. Justin was spreading the blanket out between trees and hulking bushes. Probably right on top of some lovely poison ivy. He lay down and Brian flopped down next to him. He was bored, bored, bored.

“Mikey’s going to have a heart attack when he realizes we’re not coming back.”

Pause. Justin sat up on one elbow. “What’s the deal with you and him?”

“Translation, is he my boooyfriend?” He took Justin’s silence for assent. “Mikey is my best friend. And boyfriends are for people who are both straight, and narrow.”

Long pause. “So, you wanna fool around?” Justin asked.

***

Brian laughed, a surprised bark. Justin was actually shaking, partly from the night air but mostly from nerves. He looked at Brian in the near-blackness, hands behind his head, tank top rucked up over his flat stomach, and wanted to touch him so much he felt sick.

“You’re a little young for me.”

Justin took a deep breath, drew his knees under him, and moved over until he was straddling Brian’s ribs. Then he sat down on Brian’s groin. Brian pushed himself up on his elbows and stared at him. “No means no, kid.”

Justin shifted his weight a little and detected a promising stiffness. “No is not exactly what you said. And there’s nothing else to do,” he said, in a tone he hoped was persuasive, sexy, and slightly bored. 

“You better know what you want,” Brian said warningly.

That was an easy one. “I want you.”

“Okay then,” Brian said, and pushed Justin over on his back.

Brian looked at him for a minute, settling his body over Justin’s, thrusting his crotch once against Justin’s. His eyes were huge, long-lashed, and moving quickly over Justin’s face, and his mouth was serious. Justin put his arms up, tentatively, stroking Brian’s biceps. Then Brian kissed him.

It was like being attacked, but in a good way. Brian bit Justin’s lip and thrust his tongue into his mouth, and would pull back and kiss his lips and lick them lightly, then move back in. And meanwhile his whole body was moving against Justin’s, and at first Justin felt like he was just hanging on, but then he ran his hands under Brian’s shirt, over the fine muscles of his back, pulled Brian toward him, felt his own hips rise up, and started to get the hang of it. His eyes closed, but then he opened them again, because he didn’t want to miss any of this.


	4. Camp

Brian woke up not long after he’d fallen asleep, cold, naked, sticky, and holding on (presumably for warmth) to the fifteen-year-old he’d just blown. The nudity hadn’t been strictly necessary, but Justin had been enthusiastic about it. Jesus Christ, fifteen. Brian put on his clothes, such as they were, and looked at the kid, who was sleeping the sleep of the just and the recently devirginized. God, he really was a nice piece of ass, and he’d been a fast learner. And there had been nothing else to do. If Mikey found out about this he’d kill Brian. Oh, who was he kidding, like there was any way Michael wasn’t going to guess. Michael always thought he was fucking twice as many guys as he was, anyway. Brian lay down and pulled the blanket up as much as he could around the both of them.

“BRI-an! Bri-an!”

Brian cracked his eyes open, flexed his fingers, and encountered Justin’s naked skin. Shit. He shoved Justin. “Get dressed,” he hissed. “We’ve got a search party.” Justin made a murmuring noise and rolled over away from the sun. Brian shook him a little, strapped on his sandals, and went toward the sound of Michael’s voice.

“BRI-AN!”

Brian stepped into Michael’s field of vision, waved, smiled a snarky smile, and walked toward him. Michael’s whole body slackened in relief.

“Good morning, Mikey. We’re fine. We were not eaten by bears, and we did not fall over the cliff. We are, however, about to pass out from hunger. Do you have any food?”

“What the fuck happened to you?”

“Language, Michael, there’s a kid here. We got lost. You know I have a shitty sense of direction.” Brian hugged Michael expansively. “Our stuff’s around here somewhere. God, what time is it?”

“It’s early. I was worried about you. Where’s Justin?”

“He’s around here somewhere, too.” By the time they got back to Justin he was, thank God, dressed, and he had folded up the probably telltale blanket. He wasn’t looking at Brian that much.

***

Daphne scooted up behind Justin and pulled on his backpack to make him slow down. He almost fell over. 

“So? What happened? I want details.”

“Your ankle has made a remarkable recovery,” Justin teased. 

“Spill!”

“We had sex,” Justin said under his breath, looking back at her and smiling uncontrollably. 

“Oh my God!” She hustled up next to him, which was a tight fit on the path but clearly necessary considering the proximity of other campers.

“Oral sex. Oral sex counts, right? For guys?”

“Sure it counts. It’s way more than I’ve ever done. So was it fun?”

“Ohhh, yeah. I wish I could get locked in a room with him and do it *all day*. It’s like, everything else just goes away. I got all these mosquito bites, and I didn’t notice at all.” Justin had the movie on constant replay in his head--Brian’s hair in his hands, Brian’s tongue in his mouth, on his cock, on his balls, Brian’s hands gripping his ass, licking the sweat off Brian’s stomach, the smell of him, sliding his mouth down Brian’s cock, Brian groaning, thrusting, clutching his shoulder, flooding his mouth. He couldn’t believe it had happened, that *he had done it.* “He has this amazing body, and I can...*control* it. Some of the time,” Justin amended. 

“Wow,” Daphne said, sounding nonplussed. “So how did you get it to happen?”

“I kind of climbed on top of him. Which I really recommend if you’re trying to get a guy to sleep with you.”

“O-kay. So is he like your boyfriend now?”

“He said he doesn’t have boyfriends.”

“Then...what are you going to do?”

Justin shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll try to get locked in a room with him.” Justin had been over this in his mind while he was speed-dressing and folding the picnic blanket. *I had sex! With Brian!* had been followed by rapid calculations concerning the serious lack of privacy camp afforded, especially for relationships illegal on a couple of levels.

“I don’t know if there even are any rooms at camp that lock,” Daphne said doubtfully.

“Yeah, that’s gonna be a problem.”

***

“You fucked my camper.”

Brian turned around and walked backwards to face Michael. “Keep your voice down.”

“Oh my God, you did, you fucked my camper.”

“I didn’t fuck him. I was very restrained. Also I didn’t have any lube.”

“But condoms, you had?”

“I never go anywhere without condoms. You know that, Mikey. I don’t want to place myself in the way of temptation.” Brian turned back around and kept hiking, but slowly, because if he sped up Mikey would just shout over his shoulder.

“Well, I can see why not. You obviously can’t resist temptation when it comes to hot blond boys.”

“It’s not like I forced myself on him. He climbed on top of me and ground into my cock, I was supposed to roll over and go to sleep after that?”

“I don’t want to know this.”

“You asked.”

Back at Greenaway, they went straight to the showers in the staff cabin, so they could make sure all the kids really took showers. The showers in the staff cabin had actual stalls and curtains, and while Brian was rubbing shampoo into his hair, so glad to be clean that he felt like moaning like one of those girls in the stupid shampoo commercials, he had a sudden fear that Justin was going to step into the stall and grab his dick. A sudden fear his dick found mildly interesting. But it didn’t happen.

The next day they ended up sitting next to each other at breakfast, at the edges of their respective cabins along the long benches in the dining hall, passing butter and syrup down the table. Brian realized their knees were touching.

“Hey,” said the kid across from Justin. “How was the climbing trip?”

“Fantastic,” Justin said, grinning, not looking at Brian, and Brian smirked despite himself.

Two days later, Eric cornered him outside the dining hall and stood too close to him. “You wanna meet up tonight?” he asked huskily.

“No,” Brian said, and moved to leave.

Eric snorted and blocked his way with one arm. “What, you found somebody better?”

“Wouldn’t be that hard,” Brian said, annoyed, and pushed his elbow down sharply.

“Well, fuck you!”

“In your dreams,” Brian said mock-sweetly, glancing back.

***

Walking around camp during art class looking for something to draw, Justin happened upon the soccer class. Brian was standing on the sidelines; evidently he was one of the teachers. Justin walked around to the other side of the field, sat down in the grass, and started to sketch him. Now that he had actually had sex with Brian, he was consumed by a desire to do it again, and again, possibly for the rest of his life. And although he nearly had Brian’s schedule down pat now, he didn’t have a plan.

Chris Hobbs jogged off the field and said something to Brian, and Brian clapped him on the shoulder. Justin narrowed his eyes. Chris sat down, and Brian called to a kid sitting on the sidelines who then ran into the game.

Justin left before the period was over and was sitting on his bunk considering the pictures when Brian walked in.

“Michael here?”

Justin closed the sketchpad hurriedly. “No, I don’t know where he is.” *And why are you here instead of at soccer?*

“This kid pulled something and I had to take him to the infirmary,” Brian said. He sat down on Justin’s bunk. “What are you looking at?”

Justin reluctantly handed his sketchbook over. Brian flipped through it slowly. “These are good,” he said with mild surprise. He got to the couple of him, looking out over the soccer field. “I wondered what you were drawing.” He put the sketchbook down.

Justin looked at him, heart pounding. “I still want you,” he said.

***

Brian hadn’t had sex for a couple of days. Given the lack of privacy in the camp, he had barely even jerked off. And here he was, sitting thigh to thigh with this kid he hadn’t actually fucked yet, this kid with red lips and blue eyes black with desire. On a bed. In a cabin into which anyone could walk at any minute. He stood up abruptly. “Not now.”

“Later?”

Brian ran over the possibilities in his head. None of them were good. “Skip out of evening activity and meet me in my cabin.” 

“Okay.” Justin stepped up close to him, and Brian bowed to temptation and kissed him, quickly.

“Later,” he said, and left.

It was another movie night (Finding Nemo) and Brian managed to talk Michael into watching his cabin.

“They’re going to ask where you are.”

“They’re going to be too busy sucking face with their little girlfriends to care, but if they ask, say I felt sick.”

“You’re fucking someone, aren’t you?”

“I just don’t want to sit through a stupid animated movie. There’s no reason I have to be there. I’ll cover the next movie night for you.”

“Yeah, okay,” Michael said, and Brian kissed him deeply.

This time there was lube, and there were condoms. Remembering his first time, which had been so painful he had briefly considered going straight, Brian rimmed Justin for a good while, then stretched him with his fingers, before putting Justin’s feet over his shoulders and moving into him. He went slow, inch by inch, until Justin bucked up against him and said “Yeah, oh, please,” and then Brian started really fucking him.

“Jack yourself off,” Brian said in his ear, and kissed him, moving his tongue along with his cock. About two strokes later Justin came all over both their stomachs, and shortly thereafter Brian’s orgasm hit him like a freight train.

He pulled out, rearranged Justin under him, and wondered muzzily how much time they had before herds of campers came tromping back after the movie. It was dark outside. “You better go back,” he said, picking his T-shirt up off the floor and wiping them both off with it. 

Justin looked languorous and a little stunned. “Wow,” he said, drawing his brows together and sitting partway up. 

Brian trailed his fingers down the side of Justin’s face, down the clear pale skin of his chest. “Go back,” he said. 

By the time the campers trooped in, Brian had pulled his shorts on and was brushing his teeth. “How was the movie?” he asked, making a token effort to look listless and ill.

“I had better things to do than watch the movie,” Chris said. “Where were you?”

“Here, trying to ward off a cold so I won’t give it to all of you.”

“Yeah, I bet you were.”

Michael came in a few minutes later, asked to speak with Brian outside, pulled him away from the cabins, and said, “So Justin felt sick, you didn’t want to see the movie, I’m thinking this wasn’t a coincidence.”

Brian lit a cigarette. “Thanks for covering for me, Mikey.”

“Well, I *wouldn’t* have if I’d known what you were doing. God, Brian, can’t you find a hot gay counselor? Or a dishwasher or something? He’s a kid.”

“Last I checked, a very satisfied kid.”

“And what’s he going to be next week when you won’t give him the time of day?” Michael blustered. “You’re supposed to be taking care of these kids! Fucking is not taking care! Fucking, with you, is like the opposite of taking care!”

“Mikey,” Brian said, still full of post-orgasmic endorphins, “nothing bad is going to happen.”

Coincidentally, Brian happened to spend part of his free period the next day dangling his feet in the lake where Justin’s swim class was. Hot day, cool water, pretty boys in swimsuits splashing each other and doing fancy dives off the dock. He was in a good mood. Although he wasn’t really sitting anywhere near the class, Justin spotted him and swam over, doing an elegant crawl that was probably the product of years of country-club lessons. Brian kicked water in his face and Justin spluttered but came up smirking. Then the evil child yanked hard on both of Brian’s ankles, pulling him off the slippery shore and into the cold lake. Brian scrambled, spluttered, swore, grabbed Justin, and dunked him, then took off his own wet T-shirt and threw it on the bank. Treading water, they grinned at each other, and Brian had a mad desire to grab the back of his neck and kiss him. He settled for running a hand over his shoulder. 

“Hey,” Justin said warmly.

Brian took advantage of the murky lake water and distant classmates to move his hand down to Justin’s ribs and waist and pull Justin’s hips briefly against his. “Hey,” he said, running his fingers lightly over Justin’s ass. “You should get a Speedo. Show off your attributes.”

“You should take your shorts off,” Justin suggested. “Show off your attributes.”

“Maybe some other time.” Under the water, he ran his knuckles up Justin’s swimsuit, over his cock. A whistle sounded. “You ought to get back to your class.”

“You’re an evil person.”

“Mmm hmm. Later.”

Brian stayed in the water for a while, watching Justin swim back. He noticed Chris squinting in their direction. Good thing he hadn’t kissed him, then.


	5. Camp

“*You* were not at the movie last night, and today you’re glowing like a Christmas tree,” Daphne observed during the scavenger hunt that night. Justin slowed down to distance them from the rest of their team.

“Elementary, my dear Watson.”

“You were having lots of sex with Brian!”

“Yeah,” Justin agreed happily.

“And apparently it was good.”

“It was fantastic. Amazing.”

“Did it hurt?”

Justin shrugged. “I’m kinda sore, but it was completely worth it.”

“Does anyone have a chess set?” Ashley called from the front of the group. “We need a rook.”

“There’s one in Croatan,” Justin offered. He had noticed it sitting on a trunk by Brian’s bed. Chris’s head swiveled toward Justin and his eyebrows drew together. Justin met his stare blankly.

“Okay, Croatan. Does anyone know where to find a feather boa?”

At breakfast the next day, Justin was holding three glasses of milk and wending his way toward his table when Chris slammed into his shoulder, splashing milk all over his shirt.

“Hey, watch it!”

“Sorry,” Chris said, not looking it at all.

***

Brian was slightly disturbed by the way Justin drew his eyes across the lake, across the dinner table, across the gym. After the lake incident, he had spent climbing class sneaking glimpses at Justin and watching his ass as he steadily ascended the wall. This was more interest than he usually retained in someone he’d fucked. So he wandered into the kitchen during breakfast, eyed the cooks and dishwashers, and ended up in the back bathroom getting sucked off by a tall, black, muscle-bound guy who looked about as unlike Justin as it was possible for a man to look. When he stepped out, he saw Justin down the hallway, flinging his shirt off on his way out of the mess hall. Brian went after him, down the steps, and stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

“What happened?”

“Fucking Chris Hobbs ran into me and spilled milk all over me. I’m going back for another shirt.”

“Want me to kiss it better?”

Justin pulled him down and kissed his mouth, which he tried to keep closed, but the kid was persistent and Brian ended up opening his mouth and kissing him for real.

“You taste weird.”

Brian just looked at him. Justin bit his lip and backed away slightly, then turned and sped toward his cabin. When Brian turned to go back in, Eric was standing at the door with a pack of cigarettes in his hand. People who had to smoke first thing in the morning had serious problems, Brian thought. 

“You’re fucking children now?” Eric sneered.

“Fuck off,” Brian said. Eric wouldn’t report him, because if Eric reported him Brian would give an explicit report on *his* sexual practices, and that might not be as bad but it would be plenty to cost him his position. Heading up the stairs, Brian realized that he felt like shit despite the recent orgasm, and the eggs were going to be cold.

***

In climbing that day, Justin assiduously avoided looking at Brian, but in an angry way instead of a cute blushing way. “What happened?” Daphne whispered.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Brian was belaying a new, overhanging climb with a lot of sketchy little holds. Justin was pretty sure he could climb it. The holds at the bottom were bad, but they weren’t all that far apart, and there was a great jug right over the ledge. He tied in and swung a foot up.

***

Brian was sure the brat was getting an extra kick out of the climb because it allowed him to parade his hot little body and superior climbing skills in front of Brian, who was literally anchored to the floor and basically had to watch as he ascended, with admirable agility, dexterity, and balance, from the shitty holds at the base of the climb, to the ledge, which strained his arm muscles attractively, over the ledge, which required one of those toes-up-by-the-ears move suggestive of interesting sexual positions, and triumphantly to the top of the climb, which afforded Brian an excellent view of the muscles working in his ass. He didn’t fall once.

“Good job,” Brian said when he came down.

“Thanks,” Justin said without looking at him. Brian took the figure-eight knot from his hands, cracked it, and untied it for him, standing very close. They looked at each other. “Are you done?” Justin asked with annoyance.

“No,” Brian said, slowly and definitely.

Justin’s expression went from studied coolness to pleased amusement, and Brian smirked back at him.

The counselors got one night off each. Michael and Brian had asked for the same one, but that request had been overruled on the grounds of their having adjacent cabins. One of them would be needed to watch the campers of the one who was out on the town (the very, very small town, unless you were going to spend most of the night driving). But after the assignments were handed out Brian got Alex, the Sioux counselor, who was assigned to the same night as him, to trade off with Michael and agree to spend the night in Croatan. This was possible because Alex wanted the same night off as Shauna, a curvy sloe-eyed counselor who was attractive if you liked that sort of thing, and Shauna had been assigned the same night off as Michael. The guy with the cabin next to Alex had neither of those nights off and didn’t care one way or the other. After all that maneuvering, Brian found that his original plan of going out with Michael, getting drunk and high, and eating a nice steak if one could be found in this backwater, was not as appealing as the idea of having a solo night off in which he could take Justin to a hotel and fuck his brains out.

“I want Justin to come with us,” he told Michael, banking on half a decade of being able to talk Michael into just about anything. “Let him fake a twelve-hour bug and say he’s spending the night in the infirmary.” 

“I don’t want your little protégé tagging along with us!” Michael protested. “And I refuse to be sleeping in the next sleeping bag over while you’re fucking him. It’s contributing to the delinquency of a minor. And I want to hang out with you!”

Brian skipped the valid but unproductive point that Michael was contributing plenty by keeping his mouth shut and considered the possibilities. “How about this--we can have dinner, just the two of us, and then we can pick him up after lights-out. There won’t be a counselor in your cabin, all the kids’ll be sneaking out anyway, and they’ll notice it even less that way. And I’ll pay for your non-adjacent hotel room.”

“You can’t afford two hotel rooms,” Michael grumbled. “You can’t afford one hotel room.”

“Let me worry about that,” Brian said.

“I’ll pay for my hotel room,” Michael capitulated. “It’ll be better than sleeping out. And how much could the hotels cost in a town that size anyway?”

***

Michael stopped Justin outside the Blackfoot cabin and said, “Look, I know about you and Brian.” Justin said nothing, having watched plenty of TV shows where people were bluffed into confessions. Michael persevered, “And I just want you to know, he will take no for an answer. Don’t feel like you have to...do anything.”

Astonished by how off-base Michael was, Justin cracked and said, “I don’t want to tell him no! It was my idea in the first place!”

Michael closed his eyes. “You realize he’s just fucking around. Brian doesn’t have relationships, he has tricks.”

“Yeah, I got it,” Justin said, mouth tight.

***

Brian and Michael found a fairly respectable Italian place of the Lady-and-the-Tramp variety (red checked tablecloths, candles dripping down the sides of bottles), had chicken parmigiana and a lot of cheap red wine, and had a good time rating the male staff’s bodies, trading pieces of the soap operas playing out among the counselors and campers, and complaining about their campers until Brian grabbed Michael’s watch and realized it was nine o’clock.

“Jesus, are you trying to make me miss him?” 

Michael shifted immediately from manic to frozen with guilt. 

“For all your bitching about how I’m going to break his poor little heart, you’re awfully eager to leave him sitting by the side of the road.” Brian shook his head in disgust. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

Justin was perched on the big Greenaway sign, kicking his heels against it. With the sign skewing the perspective, and the dark bleaching out the details of his form, he could have been younger than fifteen. He could have been twelve. He jumped down when he saw the car, and Brian was relieved to encircle him with his arms and find that he felt the same as ever, warm and firm and strong. Michael didn’t get out of the passenger’s side and Brian didn’t feel like pushing it, so he ushered Justin into the back seat and drove them back to town.

It had been a good idea in his head. It had probably also been a good idea in Justin’s head, since Justin had acceded enthusiastically. But it turned out to be weird. First Mikey was sulking next to him and Justin was in the back where he couldn’t touch him to either turn him on or calm him down, and then they were at a cheap motel checking into two rooms looking like God-knows-what (cousins? why would cousins need two hotel rooms?), and then Mikey was stalking down the pavement to his distant room and Brian almost wanted to say, come back! The motel room was like hundreds of motels everywhere, with bedspreads in non-staining colors, a strip of paper over the toilet seat, a TV bolted to the wall, and the smell of stale smoke. Brian realized his fantasy hotel room had been more like the suite in *Pretty Woman*, with plush carpet and fluffy white bathrobes. More the kind of place Justin could probably afford, with one of his parents’ credit cards.

Justin was fiddling with the air conditioner. Brian tossed one of the polyester bedspreads on the floor and peeled back the stiff white sheets, then walked over to Justin, who had gotten the air the way he wanted it and was standing there looking serious. He put his hands on Justin’s waist under two layers of clothes, pulled him in tight, and kissed him long and deep, and the polyester bedspread and brown carpet started to go away.

***

Justin rolled over and his nose almost bumped Brian’s shoulder. Brian was asleep on his back, hair sticking up at funny angles, mouth slightly open, giving Justin a good view of his nearly-Greek profile. For this minute not trying to show off, or prove something, or get something, or intimidate someone. Justin trailed his fingers along Brian’s smooth chest, over his nipples, and in a minute Brian started up, blinked, realized where he was, and settled back with a smirk to let Justin go to work on him.

Michael was banging on the door before light had started to seep through the heavy motel drapes. Brian rolled out of bed and walked to the door naked. Justin stretched, yawned, sat up, pulled the sheet over his lap and enjoyed the view. Well, the view and Michael’s annoyance. It was dumb, particularly since Michael was a nice guy and had gone out of his way to help with the escape from camp, but Justin kind of liked the way Michael was so clearly jealous. It made him feel like there was something to be jealous of.

“I didn’t order room service,” Brian said.

Michael rolled his eyes. “We’ve got to leave now if we want to make it to the dining hall at the same time as everyone else.”

“We’ll be out in a minute.”

Michael drove, because Brian and Justin were practically asleep on their feet. Justin wasn’t sure how he was going to make it through the day, actually. But when they drove through the tiny downtown, Brian insisted on stopping in front of a diner and getting everyone large coffees, and that helped a little. Justin stretched his legs out in the back seat, ignoring the seat belt, and sipped his scalding coffee, enjoying the weak morning sun, the wind on his face, the line of Brian’s nose and the way his throat moved as he drank. He was starting to recognize this glow of contentment as the predictable aftermath of sex. Various parts of his body were tired or very, very sore, but the glow superseded that. Like after a good run. No, more like after winning a swim match. But better. 

And underlying this feeling that all was right with the world was incredulity every time he looked at Brian, that he had taken this guy’s clothes off, made him come, had this guy’s tongue and dick in his ass. It wasn’t so much that he was surprised Brian was interested as that he was surprised the world contained this, these things so apart from his everyday life. Everyone must be walking around with these secret thoughts in their heads, secret knowledge of certain other people. Okay, pursuing that idea got gross really fast.

Brian finished his coffee, crumpled the cup up, dropped it on the floor, and reached back and touched Justin on the thigh. They both grinned. Michael sped up.

They dropped Justin off at a respectable distance from the dining hall, and he sprinted up there while they parked the car.

“You’re cutting it close,” Jeff said as he slid in at the table. “Where’ve you been?”

“Out. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one,” Justin said, taking a biscuit. 

Jeff began to gloat about his night with the lovely Veronica, and Justin was eating steadily and hoping that was the end of it when Jeff shoved him and said, “So what about you, did you finally get in Daphne’s pants?”

“God, no,” Justin said with a look of disgust, then realized his mistake.

Jeff looked confused. “Then who were you with? I never see you with any other girls.”

Chris, who was across the table and two seats down, said loudly, “I don’t think Justin likes girls.”

“Fuck off,” Justin said dismissively.

“You know who I think Justin likes? I think he likes my counselor,” Chris said. He stage-whispered, “It’s okay, Justin, we won’t tell him.”

Justin pressed his lips together and stabbed his eggs. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. Jeff still looked confused, and of course everyone within hearing distance was listening avidly. 

Brian sat down at the end of the table. “Hi, guys,” he said. “What’d I miss?” 

That afternoon, Brian walked into Justin’s cabin while he was pulling on his swim trunks.

“Oh, sorry,” he said unapologetically, and came over and leaned against Justin’s bunk.

Justin gave a small laugh. “You want something?”

“Eight hours of sleep.”

“Don’t think I can help you there.”

“I’m fucking exhausted,” Brian said, putting a foot up on Justin’s trunk.

“Exhausted from fucking,” Justin agreed lightly.

“I’m going back to town for a couple of hours. I want a triple espresso and ice cream that doesn’t come in Dixie cups. Come if you want to, I’ll have you back before climbing.”

Justin calculated quickly: swimming, lunch, rest hour, climbing. Not a bad time to play hooky; Brian must have calculated, too. He took off his swim trunks and started pulling on clothes. Him, Brian wanted him. Well, Michael couldn’t skip out of whatever he was teaching as easily as Justin could skip out of swimming, but still.

“So where do you guys go to college?” Justin asked on the drive out. Considering the number of hours they’d spent together, he’d realized he knew appalling little about Brian’s life. 

“I go to CMU. Michael goes to Allegheny.”

“What are you majoring in?”

“Business,” Brian said shortly.

“God, you’d be like my dad’s perfect son. He wants me to major in business. And play team sports. And not draw.”

“I’m not anyone’s perfect son. I’m gay. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

Justin frowned. “How did they act when you told them?”

“I haven’t told them. I’m not going to tell them.” Brian glanced over at him and added, relenting, “But Michael’s mother is so supportive she’s practically turned into a gay man herself, so it depends on who you’ve got.”

“I don’t think I’ve got someone like Michael’s mother,” Justin said doubtfully. “My family’s kind of Norman Rockwell.”

“Then you should probably keep your mouth shut, at least until you don’t need their money anymore. And don’t care whether they think you’re going to hell.”

“Well, that’ll be never,” Justin said, and Brian shrugged.

***

The town had a touristy little main street. Brian found a cafe and got himself a triple latte and a turkey sandwich. Justin, who turned out to be familiar with fancy espresso drinks (no wonder his growth was stunted) ordered a caramel mocha, which Brian refused even to taste, and ham and cheese. When Brian took out his wallet Justin started to look embarrassed and said, “I’m sorry I don’t have any money.”

“It’s okay,” Brian said, shrugging it off. “I know you don’t.” Brian liked buying people things (some people), which was inconvenient considering the current state of his finances, and he realized it was a power thing, but so what. They took their stuff outside and sat at a little iron table in the sun. Down the street a girl in a bright pink dress was crying histrionically, “I’ll forget all about you! I’ll forget all about this summer! I’ll never look back!” Brian was getting annoyed when he noticed the cameras. He nudged Justin. “They’re shooting a movie.”

“Cool!” Justin said. “Maybe we’ll see it when it comes out!”

“Somehow I think this one’s going to straight to video.”

The camera crew, the pink girl, and the guy she was yelling at moved farther down the street. Brian leaned back and put his feet up on the edge of Justin’s chair, brushing Justin’s knee, enjoying the absence of ravenous, boisterous kids. The latte wasn’t half bad, either. A fat man in unflattering shorts and a broad-brimmed sun hat was walking a tiny fluffy dog, and a fit, tan, grimy young couple bearing backpacks was looking inquisitively at every shop (looking for a shower?). A family came down the street on bicycles, the older kid well ahead of the parents. Justin licked salt off his fingers. In spite of the scene’s Mayberry quality, Brian felt mildly aroused and obscurely good. He scooted toward Justin, opened his mouth, and let Justin feed him potato chips so he could lick the salt off Justin’s fingers himself. 

“You still want ice cream?” Brian asked when all the food was gone, and Justin assented readily. Brian remembered that stage of adolescence when he could eat a large pizza by himself, when he seemed to be hungry every minute. He had passed that point now, and someday he would have to quit with the ice cream or he would end up with his dad’s belly, but so far he still seemed naturally inclined toward skinniness and he was going to enjoy it while it lasted. They walked till they found a small grocery store, got a pint of Chocolate Fudge Brownie, and passed it back and forth on the way back to the car. By the time they got there it was turning soupy from the heat of the sun and their hands, and Brian fished out the remaining brownie chunks and fed them to Justin. 

On the way out of town, Justin started feeling him up, and Brian cocked an inquiring eyebrow at him.

“Still haven’t had enough?”

“I’m rejuvenated,” Justin said, unbuttoning Brian’s shorts. 

“Or just juvenile,” Brian said, but he pulled over, because he’d been looking at Justin’s mouth for over an hour, and really, how could you have enough?

After mutual blowjobs, they came damn close to falling asleep in the back seat, tired and warm and sated in every way. But Brian pulled himself responsibly out of his torpor, prodded Justin back into the passenger’s seat, and got on the road, driving faster than before.

“Chris Hobbs thinks I have a crush on you,” Justin said.

“You do have a crush on me,” Brian said, half-joking.

Justin frowned. “I do not. It’s not a crush when you’re having all kinds of sex. It’s--a relationship.”

“This is not a relationship,” Brian said in a “careful--sharks swim here” voice.

“Oh, really,” Justin said, challengingly. “Then what is it?”

“This is just fucking around,” Brian said, recalling uncomfortably his recent, inexplicable urges to have Justin *around*, in his bed, in his car, across the table from him, *with* him. “If you’re looking for hearts and flowers you should find yourself a nice girl.”

“I’m not looking for hearts and flowers,” Justin defended, annoyed. “And I don’t have a crush on you.”

“Fine.”

“You seem plenty happy to have me around.”

“You give great head, what’s not to like?”

Justin glared at him and sat back, sulking. They drove on in silence.

Greenaway had a hard-core wilderness camping option, a month of biking, backpacking, kayaking, and climbing for kids 12 to 16. At the end of their session, the wilderness campers came back to the camp for a night to shower so they’d look respectable for their parents. Since not everyone would fit in the dining hall, there was a camp-wide cookout, blankets dotting the broad lawn and hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on grills. The Blackfoot and Croatan boys were eyeing the brand-new, very fit, very tan teenage girls with great interest, and Brian was eyeing the wilderness counselors. He looked them up and down until he found raised eyebrows and an answering smile.


	6. Camp

Justin had carried his plate over to where Daphne and Matt were sitting, but he couldn’t help but notice Brian whispering in the ear of a tall, dark wilderness counselor and then walking off with him toward the staff cabin. Daphne followed his eyes sympathetically, and when Matt got up to get more drinks, she said, “He sure gets around.”

“He’s pitching a fit because I said we were in a relationship.”

Daphne looked doubtful. “You think?”

“We spent the whole night fucking, woke up together, showered together, drove to town again, had lunch, and fooled around in the car. Doesn’t that sound like a relationship to you?”

“I don’t know,” Daphne said helplessly. “It sounds like...a lot of sex. But he was having sex with Eric, and I guess they weren’t, like, boyfriends.”

“This is different,” Justin said, flipping through his picture gallery of Brian: Brian grinning as melted ice cream dripped down Justin’s chin, Brian leaning against his bunk with studied nonchalance, Brian looking at him with enormous liquid eyes and pulling him close for a kiss. Brian saying, “I’m gay,” as if it were something to be endured. “This is different,” he repeated, shaking his head, almost sure. “I thought you were all in favor of me being with Brian,” he said accusatorially.

Daphne shrugged and put up her hands in a “what can I do?” gesture. “I’m in favor of what makes you happy.”

Matt came up behind Daphne bearing drinks and handed Justin his Coke.

The next day Justin went to climbing and climbed the route Brian was belaying, which was not hard enough for him to really show off on, and when he came down Brian barely looked at him. When he was standing with Daph waiting for the next climb, he thought for a second he felt Brian looking at him and glanced toward him, but Brian’s eyes were resolutely on the little girl whose harness he was checking.

***

When Brian was on his way to the soccer field in the morning, the skies that had previously looked vaguely ominous opened and he got soaked. So he went back to the cabin, and the campers who had outdoor activities trickled in one by one. A couple of them started playing poker. Brian considered asking to be dealt in, wondered whether taking your campers’ money constituted unacceptable line-crossing, recalled recent adventures in very clear line-crossing, got turned on, thought about Justin’s ass, remembered Justin saying “You seem plenty happy...”, sounding uncertain in a way he hadn’t since he’d first said, “You wanna fool around?” He threw his book down and went over to join the poker game.

Brian had a good poker face when he wanted one, but the cards didn’t go his way. He folded the first couple of hands, and then he got bored and tried to bluff his way out of a hand with queen high, but this kid Jamie turned out to have a fucking straight. Then it was Brian’s turn to deal and he dealt a hand of seven-card draw, just to keep the betting going longer, and he lost five bucks on that one. Then some kid called a list of wild cards so long he wasn’t even completely sure he didn’t have any. Then the next one called five-card stud, and Brian had nothing at all, seven high, and he started to resent the way Jamie and Caleb were raking in his money. Then a flash went off in his face. Chris had pulled out a camera.

“I’m out,” he said, laying down his cards. “I’m going over to Blackfoot. Don’t commit any felonies while I’m gone.”

Michael appeared to be actually reading a book, and his campers were calmly reading, writing letters, eating candy bars, and speaking to each other in low voices with intermittent giggling. Justin wasn’t there. Brian hung his dripping rain jacket over a towel rack and then pushed Michael over and flopped down next to him. The book turned out to be not a real book but a history of Superman, with lots of excerpts of comics from the thirties. He laid his wet head on Michael’s lap and Michael squirmed, protested, and pushed him off.

“What’s going on in your cabin that you had to escape?”

“I’ve got card sharks.”

The screen door banged open and Justin tromped in, soaked to the skin, every muscle of his familiar chest clearly outlined by the thin wet T-shirt. Unfortunately his shorts were heavy cotton and left something to the imagination. Brian averted his eyes before Justin saw him, but Michael hadn’t missed it.

“Did you want to see me or were you looking for someone else?” he asked in an aggrieved undertone.

Brian sat up and scooted his back against the wall next to Michael’s. “It’s all about you, Mikey. The thing to which you refer is long over.” His eyes strayed to the far corner, where Justin was stripping off his wet clothes, facing the wall. His back looked angry. His ass, as usual, looked fantastic.

“Well, that explains what’s wrong with him.”

On the bunk over Justin’s head, two kids were huddled together paging through something, probably Playboy. Brian flashed back to long afternoons spent poring over comic books and fan magazines in Mikey’s old room with the superhero wallpaper, with Debbie bringing up milk and brownies. Before anyone had been accepted to college, before Brian had charmed fake IDs out of an older girl and started dragging Michael out to clubs with back rooms. He snuggled up to Michael. “Tell me about Lex Luthor’s latest nefarious exploit,” he said.

“What’s really cool is how these two guys started the whole thing, this, you know, legend, this story everyone knows--it was all dreamed up by two nerdy kids back in the thirties,” Michael said, enraptured.

Redressed, Justin lay down on his bed on his stomach, clutching a pencil and a sketchbook.

***

The rain continued through the morning, essentially canceling classes and marooning everyone in their bunks. Justin drew for a while. He tried to draw Andy, who was reading on the next bunk over, but then Andy lay down so mostly his feet were visible. He tried the feet. He tried to banish the knowledge that Brian was sprawled on Michael’s bunk and ignoring him. Knowing that Michael knew that he and Brian were having sex, which had been a thrill just a couple of days ago, was now aggravating and somewhat humiliating, because Michael obviously also knew he’d been dumped. At least he was fairly sure he’d been dumped, although he supposed it was possible that if he draped himself all over Brian and swore he would never again act like they were in a relationship, Brian would just unbutton his shorts and lean back with his legs spread. But that was such bullshit. He didn’t have to put up with that. Unless of course he wanted Brian, which he really, really did. He closed up his sketchbook and started trying to write his parents a letter instead. It was getting harder to think of things to say.

At noon Brian waded back to his cabin, for which Justin was grateful, and everyone went to lunch. While they were passing sandwich fixings back and forth (it took a long time to make a sandwich when everything had to be passed down the whole table) the percussion on the roof slowed, then stopped, and the sun came through the windows.

After climbing, during which he listened to Daphne chatter about Matt and continued to studiously ignore Brian, Justin went back to his cabin to change into cleats for a muddy Ultimate class. Caleb, who was not even in Blackfoot, was sitting on Justin’s bunk looking through his sketchbook. Which was half-full of pictures of Brian. Brian standing on the soccer field, Brian’s profile, Brian naked. Brian’s name, in case anyone was missing the likeness.

“Hey!”

Caleb looked up. “Sorry. I was waiting for Andy, to go to archery, and it was just lying here. You’re really good.”

“Um. Thanks.” He took the sketchbook out of Caleb’s hands.

“Brian’s...hot, huh.”

Justin really couldn’t think of an appropriate answer. The first thing that sprang to mind was “duh” and the second was along the lines of “mine mine mine.”

“You’re hot, too,” Caleb said.

Justin took another look at Caleb. He was skinny, but he had some muscles. Clear skin, dark blond hair, long nose, long legs. “You want to get out of here?”

They went out to the boat house, which was cool and muddy and crammed with kayaks and canoes. Justin looked Caleb’s nervous face over, cupped Caleb’s jaw in his hand, and kissed him for a while before sliding his hand down Caleb’s skimpy nylon shorts. He didn’t feel like getting down on his knees in the mud.

On the way back to their cabins, walking through the woods, Justin saw a figure coming down the path that he would recognize a mile away. He pushed Caleb up against a tree and kissed him slowly, until Brian was close enough to see them but not close enough to freak Caleb out, and then he let him go.


	7. Camp

Cutting through the woods to the gym, late for basketball (not that the kids really needed to be taught basketball anyway), Brian did a double-take on the horny couple and had several thoughts in quick succession:

1\. Justin was putting on a little show.

2\. Justin had found a kid his own age, which should get him off Brian’s back, which should be a good thing for both of them.

3\. His gaydar had totally failed him on Caleb. Not that he had any interest in Caleb, but he wondered how Justin had picked up on it.

Justin quit kissing Caleb and they walked ahead on the trail. Brian slowed down, then decided to enjoy the awkwardness and lengthened his stride again.

“Hello, boys,” he sang. “What have you been up to?”

“Tree identification,” Justin said blithely. Brian knew damn well Justin didn’t have tree identification--actually he was pretty sure Justin had Ultimate this period--but with someone else it would have been a fairly convincing lie. Caleb’s ears turned red. 

“Have fun collecting leaves. I’m late for basketball,” he said, smiling to let Justin know he knew exactly what was going on and was not at all upset.

Evening activity that night was Capture the Flag. The entire camp was divided into two teams, white shirts and any other color shirts. A handful of counselors volunteered to referee, but most of them were playing, which had its humiliations. Brian made a reckless early bid for the white team’s flag and was led to jail. Justin was already in jail, having evidently been even more reckless.

“How was he?” Brian asked, just to make conversation.

“If I say he was good are you going to seduce him?”

“I don’t seduce fifteen-year-olds unless they seduce me first.”

“So you’re just being jealous.”

“I’m just being polite,” Brian said with considerable restraint. “I think it’s good you found yourself a twinkie.”

“We’re just fucking around,” Justin said disdainfully.

Chris ran by and tagged Brian free.

***

Languishing in jail, Justin wished he hadn’t used the word “jealous.” Anyone who got all het up about “relationship” was bound to resent “jealous.” Matt kindly tagged him free, and once he’d walked to the team boundary he looked back and saw Matt following, waving the color team’s flag. Daphne, displaying no girlfriend loyalty, made a beeline for Matt and tagged him. He dropped the flag and went off to jail.

On the way back to the cabins, after the white team had been soundly defeated, Justin caught up with Daphne and briefed her on the Caleb story. 

“I thought you were all hung up on Brian,” she said in confusion.

“It’s just sex, it’s fun with different people.”

“And now you kind of sound like Brian. I can’t believe you’ve had sex with two guys in, like, two days.”

“Well, I’m sure you could if you wanted to.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I want to right now,” Daphne said dubiously. “I’m not sure about having sex with one guy yet.”

“So then I kissed Caleb right in front of Brian and he didn’t even care.”

“Maybe he doesn’t get jealous,” she suggested. “Or maybe he does and you just can’t tell.”

“But it could still be good, I think. Because now I’m sort of more on his level.”

“What about Caleb?” Daphne asked, just before Matt came up behind them and threw an arm around her shoulder. She kissed him on the cheek. Justin eyed him critically and decided Matt didn’t do anything for him, which was probably a good thing.

Caleb started sitting next to Justin at meals and wanting to hang out during evening activity. He didn’t say a lot, and he didn’t make a move; he just hung around. Once he asked if Justin would draw him, so Justin came over during rest hour and did some sketches. It was nice to have a willing model--usually he was drawing people who were moving around, or just in his head. But his eyes kept skimming past Caleb to Brian, who was napping, shirtless, turned toward the wall, and when Jamie put out a call for poker players, Justin was happy enough to join in.

A couple of days after the boathouse encounter Justin suggested they skip riding, the only class they had together, and they met up in Croatan and went to the woods to fuck around. Justin lugged his sleeping bag along, got to the cabin early, and filched lube and a condom from Brian’s trunk. It turned out Caleb didn’t want to use them, though. Caleb actually seemed to be made nervous just by the sleeping bag. 

Then it turned out Caleb had doubts about his sexuality. 

Justin had *concerns* about his sexuality, yeah. Particularly about telling his parents. Especially his dad. But he didn’t have *doubts.* At all. When he touched Brian, when he buried his face in Brian’s shoulder and inhaled, his whole body went *yes.* He got hard, and his heart beat faster, but mostly he relaxed, his whole body and mind relaxed and everything just worked. With Caleb the sex was less good--partly, Justin figured, because Caleb was starting from zero experience, and partly because they had less time in less comfortable places--but he was still clear that it was basically the right kind of sex. 

Frankly, Justin felt that any guy who at fifteen was attracted enough to another guy to come onto him, running the risk of the guy not only rejecting him but also making fun of him and telling everyone else he was a fag, was probably gay. And he didn’t have much patience with the doubts.

“I don’t know what you are,” he said fairly. “But I’m gay. I don’t feel guilty about it, I don’t think I can change it, I don’t want to change it. This is the way I am. I like guys.”

“You’re so healthy,” Caleb sighed.

There were campfires that night, with S’mores and ghost stories. Justin was considering pulling Caleb off into the woods when a girl in a sparkly tank top came up to them and offered Caleb her second marshmallow.

“Thanks, Marissa,” he said with a smile, and popped it in his mouth.

“You want to come sit with us?” she asked.

“Sure. Catch you later, Justin.” 

She took Caleb’s nonsticky hand to lead him away. He looked back apologetically. Justin gave him a disgusted look and shook his head.

An arm came around his shoulder. “S’more?” Brian asked, his other hand proffering one. Justin took it from him, and the graham cracker broke between his fingers. It was a good one, marshmallow and chocolate both fully melted. 

“How’s it going with Jacob?”

Justin rolled his eyes and swallowed. “Fine.”

“Mmm hmm,” Brian said, wrapping his arm around Justin’s chest.

“I’m sure he and Marissa will be very happy together,” Justin said darkly.

“Not everyone’s as brave as you are.”

“It’s not like I’m out or anything.”

Brian released his hold and turned Justin around to face him. “You go after what you want. That’s a lot more than most people do.”

“Did you go out with girls?”

***

“Yeah,” Brian said. 

There had been a girl senior year of high school he’d really liked--she was smart and confident and didn’t take much of his bullshit. He took her home for dinner once, took her to the prom. It was easier. That is, the public parts were easier, and the private parts were fine. A mouth on your cock was almost always a good thing. But it wasn’t urgent, urgent and desperate and painful and necessary, the way sex with guys had always been. So Elizabeth went to Cornell and they stopped calling each other, and he hardly ever thought about her. But he still thought about girls, now and then, and wondered if he could meet a girl he liked enough.

And here was this kid in front of him who seemed to have no doubts at all, who had come onto him more than once and in the face of at least token resistance, who when Brian had disappointed him had gone right out and found someone else. Someone who was also letting him down.

“Was it...I thought you said you were gay.”

“I was experimenting,” Brian said dryly. Justin had a small smear of chocolate on the side of his mouth, and Brian really wanted to kiss him, but he settled for wiping it off with his thumb, then sucking his thumb into his mouth slowly and watching Justin lick his lips.

“I think...”

“Brian, we’re totally out of marshmallows, you got any more?” Chris called, his voice coming closer. 

Brian stepped away from Justin and headed back toward the rest of the cabin. “No, I do not. Aren’t you in sugar comas yet?”

***

On second thought, Justin was relieved Chris had interrupted them before he finished saying “I think I’m done experimenting,” even if it was true. In terms of genders. And people--all Brian, all the time sounded fantastic to him. They could experiment in other ways. Except that was a stupid, sappy hope about a guy who was clearly still experimenting in every way there was.

Trudging back toward the campfires, he practically tripped over Daphne, who was sitting on the ground tearing grass apart. “Daph, what’s wrong?”

She looked up, shaking her head, and he bumped down next to her.

“It’s no big deal. Matt and I had a fight, that’s all.”

“Why, what about?”

She shook her head.

“Daph.”

“It turns out he’s a homophobe, is all.”

Justin squinted in confusion. “Okay, tell me what happened.”

Daphne wiped her nose. “Michael was telling one of those comic book stories, you know, it wasn’t a ghost story but everyone had run out of ghost stories, and it had evil guys and suspense and all, and he was totally hamming it up. So I said, isn’t Michael great, and Matt said, eh, he’s so gay. *Is* Michael gay?”

“I think I saw him kiss Brian with tongue once.”

“Okay, whatever. So I said, there’s nothing wrong with being gay, and he said, it’s unnatural, it’s just wrong. And I said, my best friend’s gay, and he said, well, as long as you’re not, and then he tried to kiss me, and then I left.”

“Wait, you outed me?”

“No, I did not out you,” she snapped. “It could be anyone. If he asks I’ll say it’s some girl at home. But Justin, if you don’t want anyone to know, you should be more...discreet. The way you and Brian make puppy dog eyes at each other, I can’t be the only one who’s noticed it.”

“Brian makes puppy dog eyes at me?”

Daphne rolled her eyes. “Justin, he stares at you all the time.”

Justin couldn’t help smiling at that, but he tried to refocus. “You know you don’t have to break up with him for me.”

“Yeah, I guess, but he was a jerk!”

“Well, you’re not going to marry him, right?”

“No,” she said quickly, looking amused and horrified.

Justin thought, I am more of a sap than my female best friend.

As he was nearing his cabin that night, taps sounding in the air because he’d dawdled in a vain hope of walking back with Brian, he heard the soft smacking noises of someone making out. He hoped that wasn’t Brian. No, sparkly tank top. Marissa and Caleb.

The next day Caleb scooted in next to him at lunch and asked, while passing the green beans, “Do you want to maybe, hang out, this afternoon?”

Justin looked at him with annoyance and said in a low voice, “Look, if you like girls, or you want to try girls out or something, go for it. But don’t flirt with Marissa and then think you can fuck around with me.”

Caleb drew back, hurt. “It’s not like you’re all, ‘I’m here, I’m queer, I’m faaaabulous!” he said indignantly, and too loudly. On his other side, Jamie’s head swiveled toward them. 

“There’s a difference between not saying, and pretending.”

“Not much difference that I see,” Caleb muttered.

“Yeah, well, I think Marissa would,” Justin snapped, and turned his attention to his mashed potatoes.

The art class had been doing acrylics on canvas for a few days, but then they were going to start matting pictures to hang in the dining hall, so Justin dashed back to Croatan in the middle of class to get his sketchbook. Ryan was sitting on the upper bunk by the door playing Gameboy, and Chris was standing by the cubbies flipping through a magazine, but he looked up when he saw Justin.

“Your boyfriend’s not here, fag.”

Chris was flipping through his sketchbook. 

Justin reached him in two steps and grabbed it, but of course Chris had seen plenty. He wasn’t going to have much choice after this about pretending versus not saying. He felt sick at the invasion. 

“I knew you had a thing for him, but this is really obsessed, man. You oughta get some help.”

He was distantly aware that the Gameboy noises had stopped.

“Like Brian would ever come anywhere near you, you scrawny little faggot.”

Justin found his voice. “You seem really interested in faggots for someone who’s not. One.”

Chris stepped threateningly closer.

“You seem really interested in Brian, too,” Justin continued.

Chris shoved him hard and he fell. There was a sharp pain at the back of his head, and then he was on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Ryan said, “*Shit,* Chris!” in alarm and revulsion and clattered down his bunk, the screen door banged open, once, twice, and someone stepped in, then picked up speed. Then Brian was crouched next to him, looking shocked and angry. 

“Hi,” Justin said, smiling a small scared smile.

“Where are you hurt?”

“My head.” He could see Ryan’s worried face over Brian’s shoulder.

“Shit, you’re bleeding.”


	8. Camp

All the counselors had had basic first aid training, but with Justin bleeding onto the wood planks of the floor, Brian’s mind couldn’t seem to fix on any useful information. He was breathing, obviously. Did they need a stretcher and an ambulance? Should he roll him over and look at the back of his head, or was that dangerous?

Justin stood up, stepped forward in a wobbly way, and put a hand to the back of his head. His fingers came away bloody. He blinked a few times, then moved each arm and each leg. “I think I’m okay.”

“Fuck no, you’re not okay.” Brian moved to his back, crouched, and tried to take a look at the wound. “You’re going to the emergency room. Can you walk, are you sure you can walk?”

“Yeah. I’m okay.”

“Fuck,” Brian said, and scooped him awkwardly up, Justin’s head resting on his shoulder. “We’re going to the hospital,” he said to Ryan.

“I want my sketchbook,” Justin said suddenly. 

“What?”

Ryan handed it to him, and he clasped it between his chest and Brian’s.

After a couple of minutes Justin started bugging Brian to put him down, and after another few minutes, realizing how far away the car was and how even though Justin was skinny and considerably shorter he wasn’t all that easy to carry, Brian gave in. His shirt had blood on it anyway, so he took it off and gave it to Justin to hold to the back of his head.

The staff parking lot was a long fucking way away, and Brian was walking slowly because he wasn’t sure Justin should really be walking at all. They passed practically no one, since everyone was in activities. At one point Justin asked, “Why weren’t you at soccer?”

“Some joker hid all the soccer balls. I hung around a while and looked, but they’re probably up a tree or some damn thing.” Brian didn’t ask what had happened--the way Chris had stormed out of the cabin gave him a good enough idea, and there would be plenty of time to deal with that later. He didn’t ask why Justin needed his sketchbook. Justin was still walking, so there would be plenty of time.

“Do you know where there’s a hospital?” the kid asked on the road.

“That’s what counselor training’s for,” Brian answered.

“I thought you had a shitty sense of direction.”

“My experience has been that emergency rooms are better marked than climbing trails.”

“What kind of experience do you have with emergency rooms?” Justin was looking straight ahead, like he was afraid to move his head, and Brian’s shirt was clearly going to be a total loss.

“Lots,” Brian said, and his stories of the collarbone broken in lacrosse, the six stitches on his thigh from the bicycle crash, the time Mikey got drunk and tried to fly, and other wholesome injuries related to sports and recklessness rather than abuse from pussies who fled the scene of the crime took them up to the emergency room door.

They were in various waiting rooms for nearly three hours. Brian had hoped a kid bleeding from the head would get faster service. 

“You’ve got to be tired of holding that, let me hold it.”

“I’ll just take it off. How much more could I possibly bleed?”

“You’re not supposed to move bandages once you’ve clotted.”

Paying no attention to him at all, Justin gently detached the revolting T-shirt, looking kind of woozy when he saw his blood.

“Those trunks should have childproof bumpers,” Brian said, getting up to get him a Coke. He remembered being fed Coke when he almost fainted in biology, the day they watched a surgery. That had put the kibosh on the med school idea. While he was up, he called Mikey’s cell and left a message to keep him from having a heart attack when he realized they were AWOL. He looked around for a cigarette machine but saw only no smoking signs. For God’s sake, hospital waiting rooms were some of the most stressful places in the world, you’d think they’d let a person smoke.

Justin drank the Coke without comment. The interfering arm rests of the molded plastic waiting room seats thwarted his desire to put his arms around the kid, and the air conditioning was brutal for people dressed to run around outside all day, particularly those who had already taken off half their clothes. The fine blond hairs on Justin’s arms were all standing up. Brian eyed the sketchbook in his lap. “Can I see it?” he asked, gesturing.

“What the hell,” Justin said with a shrug.

He’d already seen the ones at the beginning—a rumpled bunk, a section of climbing wall with a roughly sketched-in figure, a couple of tries at a smiling Daphne, Brian on the soccer field. Then, interspersed with sketches of other campers and more obliging things that sat still, there followed Brian smirking, Brian looking serious, doodles of Brian’s name in different fonts (which seemed a lot more embarrassing than the pictures), and a finished, not half bad drawing of Brian stretched out naked on the bed at the hotel. Jesus, the kid must have been up all night. 

Shit. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to leave it in the cabin.

Brian put a careful hand on Justin’s damaged head, kissed him on the temple, ruffled his hair, and handed the book back. “Thanks for showing me.”

After a lot of questions about Justin’s vision (fine), dizziness (none), and whether getting poked with a stick felt the same on both legs (yes), the doctor stitched up the cut and told Brian he might have a concussion, so someone should wake him up on the hour throughout the night to make sure he was okay. But there appeared to be no serious head trauma. Brian’s heart rate started to return to normal. Justin didn’t seem all that relieved, maybe because he’d already known his body was in working order, maybe because his imagination wasn’t as dark as Brian’s. He kind of dragged back to the car.

“What’s wrong?” Brian asked as he unlocked the door.

“I just don’t want to go back.”

Brian squeezed into the car, which was sweltering, and rolled the window down all the way. He looked out the window, then over at Justin, who had twisted around to toss the sketchbook and the stiffly bloody shirt in the back seat. The doctor had said to wait till tomorrow to wash his hair. 

Back at camp he would have to pull the whole story out of someone, lecture Chris without putting a fist through his teeth, probably lecture Justin, and surrender Justin to the school nurse.

“So let’s not go back.”

Justin looked startled. “Really?”

“We’ll go back in the morning,” Brian clarified, scaling down the fantasy. “We could use a day off. And we already spent half of it in the fucking emergency room.” He thought for a second. “I’ll call and leave a message saying they kept you overnight for observation, and I’m staying with you.”

Justin started to smile, and Brian realized it had been a while since he’d seen that. “Where do you want to go?”

“Mmmm...New York,” Brian suggested.

“How about the south of France?”

“Any place with nude beaches is fine by me.” Brian started the car, just to get out of the damn parking lot. “Or good clubs. Maybe San Francisco.”

“You know, it’s only about four hours to New York,” Justin pointed out.

“You want to go?”

“Yeah! If you’re willing to drive all that way. And drive back in the middle of the night.”

“So we’ll just come back for lunch. God, if we can find anywhere to sleep.” He stopped at a gas station. “You need real food, or will you survive on gas station food until we get there?”

“I love gas station food,” Justin said sunnily.

***

Justin was in a fantastic mood. Okay, the day had started unbelievably badly, and at some point he was going to have to deal with Chris Hobbs, who was a classic homophobic prick to whom he was essentially out of the closet, and he had a dozen stitches in the back of his head and several ibuprofen in his stomach. But. Car, sun, open road, *Brian,* New York. And, hey, Pringles.

It really was amazing how happy it made him just to look at Brian next to him. All his. For the rest of the day. Surely there was going to be sex. There was always sex. Well, not so much lately. But just the other night Brian had done that totally suggestive chocolate-sucking looking right in his eyes. Of course, that was before the sketchbook revelations. So he had been drawing him, so fucking what. But then there was the Brian-Brian-Brian in the margins, like the doodles of a stupid lovesick girl...Justin grimaced.

Brian squeezed Justin’s thigh lightly and left his hand there. His skin seemed to light up, and the sensation ran from his leg up the rest of his body. Justin relaxed into a smile.

“So where do you want to go?” Justin asked in the Holland Tunnel, scrutinizing the map they’d gotten at the gas station. He’d been to New York before, with his parents, but they’d done wholesome family things--museums, Central Park, FAO Schwartz--and they’d planned it all ahead of time, using guidebooks and comparing closing times. Now he just had a road map and someone he wasn’t in a relationship with.

“Chelsea. You’ll like it, it’s like a sea of queers.” Brian paused, considering. “But first we’ve got to find a hotel room. So, first, phone, guidebook. Then food.”

Maybe Brian wasn’t so different from his parents, in terms of planning ahead.

“You might want a shirt,” Justin suggested. “Not that I’m not enjoying this.”

“Fuck. Phone, guidebook, shopping, food.”

Eighth Avenue was, as promised, thronged with men, many of them gorgeous and scantily clad, some of them making out. Men in half-shirts, mesh shirts, translucent shirts, tiny shorts, a few in pants with cutouts or mesh backs that showed their asses...Brian, wearing nothing but soccer shorts, would look almost conservative in this crowd. Justin had kind of known places like this existed, but he hadn’t ever seen one. Maybe he could move here, someday, and be normal. And safe. Someone like Chris would never even come here.

During forty-five minutes spent looking for a place to park and another half hour locating a bookstore with a guidebook listing cheap hotels, they noticed that pay phones had about disappeared from the city streets, shrunk from Superman-useful booths to credit-card-sized cells in the hands of every third New Yorker. Brian left Justin wide-eyed in Erotica, saying “Wait here,” and sidled over to a bookstore clerk. Justin’s eyes followed him as he looked the bookstore guy over with a knowing smile, leaned over the counter, and said something directly into his ear. *He’s gonna go fuck him in the bathroom,* Justin thought with resignation, wondering what the attraction was--the guy was balding and thick around the middle. *I’m right here, for God’s sake. Why doesn’t he want to fuck me in the bathroom?* But instead the clerk let Brian around the counter, staying close enough that Brian had to squeeze past him, and gestured to a phone by a computer. Brian sat down, produced the guidebook, and started going through hotels one by one.

Quite a while later, Brian swept by and dragged Justin up from the floor by one hand. “Put down the porn, we’ve got a reservation. It’s time to try on clothes.”

Justin grinned. He loved the way Brian could sweep through a room like a tornado. “I’m starving, can we get food first?” 

“I want to eat somewhere where they’re going to care whether I’m wearing a shirt. We’ll get you an ice cream cone.”

Of course as soon as Brian found a place that had satisfactory clothes in the window, he had to finish the ice cream cone in two bites. And then he had not only blood but also chocolate ice cream on his shirt, like a three-year-old. Next time he got in a car with Brian he was definitely bringing a change of clothes. Wiping his sticky hands on his shirt, he bounded to the back of the store, where Brian was already holding up a pair of black leather pants.

“It’s like ninety-five degrees outside,” Justin said.

“And these cost five hundred dollars, but I’ll look fantastic in them. Here, try these. We’re just trying them on, we’ll get something cheap.”

“These are pink!”

“You’ll look good in them.”

Actually, he did look good in them, although more in a cute little gay boy way than in a sleek, expensive liquor ad way, the way Brian looked in the black ones. And he loved the way the leather felt under his fingers, smooth and soft and strong.

In between trying on a tight black T-shirt, a deep red button-down shirt, a white wifebeater, a couple of leather jackets, and a long-sleeved collared shirt you could see straight through, Brian tossed him a silver spangly shirt, a black mesh shirt, a pale and dark blue baseball tee, a sleeveless orange shirt, and some shorts that were so small they embarrassed him.

“Get some pants, too,” Brian instructed.

“Are you sure you want to spend this much?”

“We’re in New York, and we have a perfect excuse to buy clothes. Stop worrying and enjoy it.”

He got the orange shirt and some relatively boring cargo pants that Brian would never have picked out, although they hung low around his hips and fit pretty tightly against his ass. With absolutely no consideration for the summer heat, Brian got black jeans and a black T-shirt, in which he admittedly looked gorgeous. Luckily he was already wearing black sandals, or Justin would have been there another hour while he tried on Italian shoes. The ice cream was fading into distant memory.

“What do you want to eat? What do you like?”

“Um, I think I like everything but sushi.”

“Sometime I’ll get you some good sushi.” Brian lit a cigarette and peered at a menu posted under glass. He prowled down the street for a little while, Justin stepping quickly to keep up. It was nearly dark, but the streets were still alive, restaurants and bars and clubs open, lit, and spilling people onto the sidewalks. They passed some people sitting at wrought iron tables huddled around little blue flames, and looking closer Justin figured out they were making S’mores, the trendy city way. A long line of people wearing various skimpy, brightly colored, shiny things were lined up to get in some club with music so loud you could feel the bass thumping in your gut as you walked past. A pastry shop displayed elaborate cakes and fruit tarts. A tattoo parlor displayed stupid designs and scary jewelry. Someone was getting a blowjob in an alley, head thrown back against the brick. It was all a welcome change from taps and lights-out at nine-thirty. Also, Brian’s palm was warm against his, Brian’s fingers were twined through his, he was starting to worry about his hand sweating, and he hadn’t missed the way the sushi statement implied future meals.

“Thai?” Brian asked, pointing out a menu.

“Sure,” Justin said. He wasn’t really sure he liked Thai--at home his little sister limited the family restaurant choices to diners, pizza, and McDonald’s--but as long as it was cooked, what the hell.

He faced Brian’s entire fish, complete with head, and the salt and pepper shrimpfried in their shells with some trepidation, but his shredded beef and coconut rice looked friendly enough, and he could pick around the green papaya. The soup was hot in both senses, but he was enjoying it until he hit a chunk of something tough and bitter and stingingly hot. He coughed, put his spoon down, and gulped water.

“Try one,” Brian ordered, holding out a shrimp. Justin reached for it, but Brian held it in front of his mouth and waited for him to open, so he had no choice about eating the shell. It was crunchy but not bad if you didn’t think about it. The restaurant was long and skinny, one row of tables up against a mirrored wall, and they were packed in between other diners. Justin really liked the idea that here, everyone would assume they were together, unlike at camp, where everyone so much assumed they weren’t that they didn’t even have to put up a very good front. Even Chris, confronted with a drawing of Brian sprawled naked in bed, hadn’t drawn that conclusion. But here everyone would figure this man with the broad jaw, rumpled hair, clearly outlined biceps, and big eyes focused on him like a laser was his. At least for now.

Justin was eating most of the pineapple ice cream, which had arrived decorated with a fin of something sweet, fried, and shaped like a Jackson Pollock squiggle, and Brian was sipping espresso when he brought it up. 

“Tell me what happened with Chris.”

A frozen chunk of pineapple slid uncomfortably down his throat. “He was looking at my sketchbook. He called me a scrawny little faggot. I...kind of suggested he had a crush on you,”-- Brian gave an amused snort--“and then he shoved me and I fell.”

“You didn’t hit him?”

Justin shook his head. “I wish I had.”

Brian pushed his espresso cup away. “I don’t. He may leave you alone now. You probably scared him.”

“I’d like to scare him a lot more.”

Brian cocked a sardonic eyebrow at him and put a hand on top of his, stroking over the back of Justin’s hand with his thumb. “Now you can go back to concentrating on how you’re in New York, surrounded by beautiful men, and I’m going to take you back to the hotel and fuck you till you pass out.”

***

Because it had been far too long since Brian prowled into a room full of sweaty, glittery, sinuously dancing men, they tried to get into a club. Then Justin tried to slip into a club while Brian flirted with the guy checking IDs. Then Justin stood on the balls of his feet and claimed to have left his license in Pittsburgh. Then Brian accepted that New York clubs were no longer letting in people who if they tried could probably get under-12 movie tickets. He briefly considered leaving Justin somewhere with a pencil and a cup of hot chocolate, but he wasn’t sure the kid would stay where he was put, and then he’d end up spending the night looking for him. 

It was weird how easy it was to forget Justin’s age. *Because it freaks you that you’re fucking a fifteen-year-old? * Well, it wasn’t just that, it was the way he talked, too. It was too bad--he’d’ve liked to take Justin to a club. He had just picked Chelsea because he’d liked it on his few previous forays to the city, but he was enjoying conducting Intro to Being a Gay Man, showing Justin this world. 

On the way back to the hotel, Justin said, “There’s no place like this in Pittsburgh, is there?”

“Not this much,” Brian agreed. “Not this many people. But there’re some clubs on Liberty Avenue. After you grow another foot you can get a fake ID.”

“Hey!” Justin said, and slapped his ass.

The lobby had all the charm of a mall bathroom, and the hotel room was big enough for almost nothing but the king-sized bed, but that was really all they needed. When Brian came out of the bathroom, Justin was sitting propped up on both pillows watching some cartoon on the little TV bolted to the opposite wall. His shirt had ridden up around his ribs and he was yawning. Brian stripped his T-shirt off, and as he unbuttoned his jeans the television clicked off and he got Justin’s complete attention.

He loved the contrast of his sun-dark hands against Justin’s smooth pale skin. He loved the eager way Justin touched him, leapt to touch him, and the way Justin was always experimenting with his mouth and tongue and hands, varying his technique, trying to coax another, different, better response. He wasn’t self-conscious--he had been the first time, but he’d been so excited he’d been bold anyway. Now he would put his naked body on display, stretching out like a cat or pushing his ass in the air. He would order Brian around, and if that didn’t work he would plead. He didn’t seem scared, even with Brian out of sight behind him or on top and holding his hands over his head, and he was up for new things, even though the old things couldn’t be old for him yet. Also, he had admirable stamina and almost no refractory period. And Brian loved the way he smelled, the crook of his neck, the juncture of his thigh, his fine fair hair; his sweat and oil and shampoo. 

The sex still wasn’t boring. It had been a while since Brian had had sex with one guy this many times, and sometimes he got bored in the middle of the first blowjob, but this wasn’t boring. Even now, with all night and no urgency between them, even now that he knew how Justin jerked and curled his toes when he came, and what his come and his mouth and Brian’s come in Justin’s mouth tasted like, even now it was a new show every time.

When Brian’s cock was approaching sore, he clicked the lamp off and pulled a sheet over them. He was almost asleep when he remembered the doctor’s orders. “Fuck!” he exclaimed.

“Unnh?” Justin asked sleepily.

“You have to be woken up every hour. Not that there are that many hours left.” Luckily, hotels were really good for that kind of thing. He called the desk and arranged for hourly wake-up calls, so throughout the night the phone rang, and Brian rolled over and swore or on one occasion knocked it off the table, but then he pulled Justin over, woke him upenough to get a coherent response, then kissed him or stroked his shoulder while Justin closed his eyes and his breathing evened out.

Brian opened one eye. Sun was streaming through the window and he could hear the shower running. He pulled his pillow over his head for a few minutes before surrendering to the inevitable and stalking Justin in the shower, making Psycho sound effects before he ripped the curtain aside. Justin jumped an unsatisfactory amount before turning toward him with a big smile and a “Hi, Brian.”

“You’re awfully chipper for a sleep-deprived person with a concussion.” Justin’s hair was plastered dark against his forehead. Brian stepped in and smoothed his hands over Justin’s slick shoulders and back. “How’s your head?”

“Fine.”

Brian touched the wound lightly. Justin had already washed it, and the stitches were only tiny bumps under his fingers. “Good.” He pulled Justin against his chest and started to survey other portions of his hot skin. It was a long time before Brian actually got around to washing his hair.

Packing and check out took no time, since they had almost nothing with them. Breakfast took longer, because Brian wanted to drink good coffee and watch pretty men go by, and Justin wanted to consume an astounding number of pastries. 

In the camp parking lot, they changed back into their dirty clothes. Brian walked Justin back to his cabin. He had been hoping everyone would still be at lunch, but when he pushed the screen door open over Justin’s head and Justin trudged in, a bunch of campers hopped off their bunks and came over to greet and question him. Evidently it was rest hour. Before his eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the cabin, Michael came over to him, looking alarmed and pissed off.

“What the hell did you do?” he asked, walking down the steps and gesturing for Brian to follow him.

“The official story is that we spent the night in the hospital.”

“I don’t want the official story, jackass, I want the real story.”

“We made a quick trip to New York.”

“You drove to *New York*?”

“It’s only about four hours from here.” Brian lit a cigarette.

“I thought he had a head injury!”

“He does have a head injury. It’s just not as serious as the staff was led to believe. And he was under observation all night. My observation,” Brian said slowly and suggestively.

“Yeah, I bet,” Michael huffed. “Brian, you were gone for a day and a half. People noticed you were gone.”

“I left a message.”

“And when they called to tell you to come back, the hospital said Justin hadn’t been admitted.”

Brian shrugged and inhaled. “I’ll tell them there was a mix-up.”

Michael shook his head in frustration. He looked a second away from stamping his foot. “I checked on your campers. Last I checked they were all still alive.”

“Well, we’ll see how that’s going in an hour.” He slung an arm around Michael’s shoulders and squeezed him. “Thanks, Mikey.”

Michael’s face was screwed up in pain and confusion. “Why do you keep *doing* this?”

“Mikey, you knew I was going to be a lousy camp counselor.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

Brian sighed, flicking away ash. “He needed to get away. So did I. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Michael shook his head again, denying something—Brian’s obfuscation or irresponsibility or the truth that for the past five years, all of Brian’s irresponsible escapes and escapades had included Michael, not some blond kid four years younger than them.

His campers’ responses to his sudden reappearance ranged from pleasure to dismay. Perhaps some of them had hoped he was gone forever.

“I’m back, so I’d recommend cancelling any dates you made tonight with your girlfriends or your dealers. I don’t know what you heard, but I was at the hospital with Justin last night. He got hurt yesterday.”

He saw some nods. “Is he okay?” Caleb asked tentatively.

“Yeah, he’s fine. He got a bunch of stitches, and they had to wake him up every hour last night to make sure he was still alive. But he’s gonna be fine.” He waited a few beats and got no more questions. Campers were settling back down with their Gameboys and comic books and probably skin mags. “So does anyone need to talk to me?”

“Ryan left,” someone offered. “He’s on the kayaking trip, they’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Okay. Anything else?” Apparently there wasn’t. He was kind of pleased, actually, maybe even a little proud that they were all here, resting during rest hour, the cabin running like a well-oiled machine even without him. On the other hand it showed a certain lack of initiative that no one had made a break for it, assuming Ryan was in fact on the kayaking trip and not hitching to Canada or something. “Chris, come out here.”

Chris schlepped sullenly down the steps, hands in his shorts pockets, head bowed. Brian walked into the woods behind the cabin, not looking back. When he was far enough that he felt like he could raise his voice without all the campers hearing him, he turned around and faced Chris, who was looking down and scuffing his foot in the dirt. He looked at Chris and saw Justin lying on the cabin floor, and he turned and hit the nearest tree so hard his knuckles came away bloody.

When he looked at Chris again the kid was two steps back. Brian advanced on him.

“Don’t touch him again. If you hit him, or shove him, or so much as call him names, him or anyone else here, I’m gonna kick your ass. And you’ll be kicked out. You got it?”

Silence.

“You got it?”

“Yeah,” Chris mumbled.

“Go on back.”

“Don’t you even want to hear my side?”

“No. You’re not the one who bled all over my shirt.” Brian sat down on a tree stump and lit a cigarette.

Chris started to walk away, but then he turned and blurted, “Justin’s got all these pictures of you. It’s like he’s in love with you.”

Brian snorted and frowned. “Go the fuck back.”

Maybe he should cool it with Justin. It wasn’t like it was easy, anyway, all this sneaking around and skipping out; if he didn’t try to be alone with him, things would cool off all by themselves. And then Justin would quit doodling his name. Of course, Justin would also stop clasping his lips around Brian’s cock and rolling over to expose his pale round ass. But maybe Chris would lay off Justin, if Brian stayed away from him. It had not escaped Brian’s attention that his name and face had resulted in Justin’s getting his scalp sliced open. 

He wondered how Justin was deflecting everyone’s questions, and whether they were complimenting his scar.


	9. Camp

It was the night of the dance. There was always a dance one night, and Justin had never minded because he liked to dance. He had liked to dance right through the girls have cooties years when most of the boys in his cabin had spent the dance standing around in an uncomfortable cluster, drinking punch. But those years were over. This year everyone had remembered to save clean clothes for the dance, everyone wanted a shower, Jeff actually shaved, and some nasty cologne got passed around. If anyone still thought girls had cooties, he was concealing it.

The gym was hung in little Christmas lights, and some counselors with sadly mainstream taste were downloading music. A few good-humored counselors were twirling around small girls in billowing dresses. A lot of girls were jiggling and gyrating in groups, and a lot of boys were standing around drinking punch and eating cookies. Justin saw a couple of girls literally chasing a boy and some other girls giggling and pushing each other toward the boys drinking punch. Several of his cabinmates quickly paired off and made efforts to dance, at least the kind of dancing where you hold onto the other person and shuffle your feet a bit. Daphne was dancing with Matt, she with some grace and he with very little. Justin moved near them and started swiveling his hips. Daphne waved and grinned. Her cheekbones were glittery. Then the music stopped, and before she could come over a slow song came on, and she lifted her arms around Matt’s neck.

Justin looked across the gym and saw Brian trailing in, after his campers. He was wearing a white shirt and dark pants, belted and sharply pleated, the most formal outfit Justin had ever seen him in. He looked good, as always, but also unfamiliar. He looked straight. Apparently in agreement with that assessement, a tan, fit female counselor with dark hair falling down her bare back went up to him, touched him on the arm, and led him toward the dancing. Justin headed toward the punch to have something to do with his hands while he stared and thought about Brian and his experimenting. The girl looked good with him; they were both tall and dark and thin. And the same age, and the opposite sex. They looked like a couple you would completely expect, if you didn’t happen to be the skinny blond boy who had woken up with Brian in bed next to you, naked and sweaty and hard.

The song changed, and Brian detached himself but kept dancing near the girl, loose but sort of caged, not moving all that much. Justin stepped outside, away from the yellow light of the gym. The crickets were loud, and here and there fireflies were spurting chartreuse flares. Down the long wall he saw some motion, a couple of people.

It was Jamie, Caleb, and a girl called Sky. She was new, and Justin wasn’t sure if that was her real name or just something she thought was cool. Her hair was dyed black; Daphne had told him that she and Caitlin had dyed it in the sink last week. Caitlin’s was blue. The three of them were passing a bottle of bourbon around.

“Hey, Justin, you want some?” Jamie called as he approached.

“Sure.” He took the bottle out of Jamie’s hand and took a swig. “Where’d you get this?”

“My counselor had it,” Sky said. “What’s she gonna say, ‘Who drank my fifth of whiskey?’”

Although he wasn’t crazy about either of them, Justin decided he preferred bourbon to vodka. “Who’s your counselor?” he asked.

“Katherine. Tall, long brown hair, real pretty.”

Justin nodded noncommittally.

“Hey, guys, what are you doing out here?” came Michael’s tenor.

“Fuck,” Sky said, giggling, and scrambled to put the bottle down by a rainspout. Caleb headed for Michael, and the rest of them followed him, leading Michael away from the evidence.

“You should come join the party,” Michael said.

*I don’t think you want to be at the party either,* Justin thought, but he went back in the gym and found Daphne scanning the crowd.

“There you are! Don’t you want to dance? Dance with me!”

When they’d rejoined the swaying crowd and Justin thought he might be starting to feel the effects of his couple of swallows of bourbon, Daphne said, “It sucks you can’t dance with who you want to.”

“Yeah, it’s stupid.”

“He’s totally looking at you, though.”

“Really?”

“Don’t turn around, dumbass! He’s leaning against the wall behind you.”

The song changed. Justin tossed his head, stroked a hand through his hair, and kept his hips moving. He pushed his pelvis forward and unbuttoned a couple of shirt buttons, trailing a hand down the center of his chest. He imagined Brian’s hips against his, Brian’s hands draped over his shoulders.

“God, Justin, keep it PG,” Daphne said, amused.

Several songs later, after Justin had started to enjoy himself, he looked around for Brian again and couldn’t find him. Katherine was dancing with Todd. Chris was dancing stupidly next to a short blond girl. Michael was talking to some girl. Justin went outside and spotted the glowing end of Brian’s cigarette.

“Hey.”

Brian pushed off the wall. “Hey.”

“I guess this isn’t much like a club in Chelsea.” The song changed to “I saw her standing there.” Brian snorted, took a last puff, ground out his cigarette butt, and took a step toward the gym. Justin stepped in front of him and touched his waist. “Dance with me.”

“No,” Brian said, definite but surprised.

“Just here. Dance with me.” Justin moved in closer and reached for his hand.

“No,” Brian said, stepping past him.

“Why does it matter?” Justin said desperately, missing Brian’s touch desperately even though (because, he was starting to realize) Brian had fucked him in the shower that morning. 

“They don’t let fags be camp counselors,” Brian hissed. “You know why? This is why. Because they’re afraid we’re going to fuck little boys.”

“I’m not a little boy,” Justin said into the silence Brian left. 

On the walk back toward the door, he passed three separate couples making out. The last one was Caleb and Marissa.

***

Goddamn stupid kid, showing his sweet ass off on the dance floor and then trying to dance with Brian practically next to a bunch of other campers. He was going to get Brian fired, like he wasn’t on thin enough ice with the camp officials already, and he was going to set himself up as a pretty target for Chris and any other homophobic asshole with a short fuse. And even if that weren’t all true, Brian wasn’t going to waltz with the kid like some proto-breeder at a cotillion, because for God’s sake, that wasn’t what gay men did. 

Brian found Michael confiscating a mostly-empty bottle of bourbon from a giggling goth girl. “Give me that,” he said, and drained it.

Two days later, while standing in line for green beans and mashed potatoes, he was confronted by a matted drawing of his face, smirking.

He checked around to see if there were others (say, the one of him naked). He thought there weren’t, but then on the way back to the table he saw the one where he was in profile. They were, he couldn’t help noticing, a lot better than the other pictures the art class had hung up, which was not entirely due to the beauty of the subject.

He wished Justin would lie a little lower.

***

Justin stayed late after riding, currying his horse thoroughly, because the day before when he’d walked back from riding he’d seen Brian walking back from swimming, in his swimsuit, towel over his shoulder, glistening. He didn’t feel like coping with that again. When he walked out of the stable, wiping sweaty hands on his jeans, Caleb was leaning against the outside wall. He straightened up and fell into step with Justin.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Justin answered, glancing at him and walking determinedly toward the cabins.

“That was good today, the jumping.”

“Thanks.” Justin registered that he was filthy, his boots hurt, and it was twenty degrees too hot to be wearing jeans. He headed toward the shade at the edge of the woods.

“Marissa says I don’t spend enough time with her.”

“So spend more time with her.”

“I don’t really want to.”

“So break up with her,” Justin said, bored.

“Yeah, I think I’m gonna.”

After a few moments of silence, Caleb said, “So you wanna fool around?”

“Not really.”

Caleb stopped walking, stepped closer, and ran a hand up Justin’s arm. “Come on, Justin, we always had a good time,” he said, putting a tentative hand on Justin’s face and leaning in to kiss him.

“God! This place is totally full of fags!” Chris said incredulously from behind Justin. Justin whirled around. Chris was coming off the trail that wound around the lake.

“Really,” Justin said. “There are more of us? Cause I could really go for someone new to fuck.”

Chris looked at him sharply. Apparently he hadn’t recognized him right off. A younger kid Justin didn’t know was behind him.

“Shut up about your disgusting sex life.”

“At least I have a sex life,” Justin said, walking up to him. “I heard Madeline’s saving herself. But maybe you’re not really interested in her anyway.”

Chris shoved him.

“Can’t you do any better than that?” Justin sneered.

Chris hit him in the stomach.

Punching him in the jaw was really pretty satisfying. The satisfaction was quickly followed by panic as Chris’s fist came toward his face, but what the fuck, kiddie karate had given him some practice feinting. He was smaller, lighter, faster, and possibly even angrier. 

“What is going on?” said a new voice. “Break. It. Up.” 

Chris staggered back and looked around. It was Shauna, a counselor in one of the baby cabins whose string bikinis had excited considerable interest among the older male campers. 

“You guys are a wreck,” she said. “Infirmary. Now. Move it.” Caleb started to follow them, but Shauna insisted he go back to his cabin. The little kid must have run off a while ago.

The infirmary was not satisfying at all. The nurse inspected their bruises and dabbed a lot of antiseptic ointment on them while they glared at each other from across the room. Shauna stood between them, periodically tapping her foot. “I’ll walk you to the head cabin,” she said when the nurse had judge it unlikely that either of them would die of internal bleeding.

***

“Where’s Chris?” Brian asked on the way to dinner, counting campers.

“He went to the infirmary,” Caleb volunteered reluctantly.

“He’s sick?”

“He got in a fight with Justin.”

Brian paused before remembering to put one foot in front of the other. “Are they okay?”

Caleb shrugged. “I guess.”

*Can’t you do better than that?* Brian thought, but he kept walking toward the dining hall containing the drawings of him, signed JT. As soon as he found Michael he tried to get details, but Michael knew nothing about it and in fact said, “I kind of thought he was with you.”

Chris arrived late to dinner, looking battered and bruised and accompanied by Shauna. Both of these factors caused a bit of a stir in the dining hall.

“Where’s the other guy?” Brian asked lightly as Shauna dropped Chris off at his table.

“He wanted a shower,” Shauna said.

Two minutes later Brian excused himself and just kept walking out the back of the dining hall, pausing briefly in the kitchen to make soulful eyes at the cook and snag three hot corn dogs. He found Justin lying on his bunk, damp and wearing only shorts. At least one bruise appeared to be forming under his ribs. Brian sat down, forcing him to move his legs, handed him two corn dogs, and started eating the other one. He didn’t say anything. He felt considerably better just seeing Justin in front of him, alive and conscious and not all that scathed.

“Don’t fucking tell me you didn’t get into fights,” Justin said accusingly, taking a bite.

“Okay,” Brian said agreeably. “Did Shauna turn you in?”

“Yeah. No evening activity for three days, and they’re going to call our parents.”

“If you fight everyone who calls you a fag, you’ll never get anything else done.” 

“He pisses me off.” After a pause, Justin added, “I can take care of myself.”

*This time,* Brian thought, and changed the subject, because he had gotten into fights, and nothing he could say would change Justin’s point of view. “What’s with the public display of affection in the cafeteria?”

“They’re just the best ones.”

“That one of Daphne’s better.”

“I’m surprised you know her name.”

“She’s with you all the fucking time, how could I not?” He got up, taking the stick of Justin’s finished corn dog. “I’m going back.”

“Thanks for the food,” Justin said, scrambling a little to face him as he left.

“Later.”

***

The first day of no evening activity, Michael was assigned to supervise them. Initially he tried to read and ignore them, but he quickly got bored and tried to engage them in a game of gin. Justin declined. Chris accepted. Then it occurred to Justin that a picture of Michael would be a good present for Brian, so he asked if he could draw him.

“Sure,” Michael said, dealing. “Those pictures you have up in the dining hall are good.”

“His whole sketchbook’s full of pictures of Brian,” Chris said disparagingly.

“Well, it was nice of Brian to pose,” Michael said mildly.

“He didn’t pose,” Justin said, positioning himself on the floor behind Chris so he could see Michael. “I just know what he looks like.” *What with, you know, all the times I’ve had SEX with him.*

“Then you’re an even better artist than I thought,” Michael said. 

“Your discard,” Chris prodded.

The second day of no evening activity, they trekked down to Shauna’s cabin, and she spent two hours studiously ignoring them while she painted her toenails and read YM. Justin finished his last book. The bruise on Chris’s jaw was turning purple, and Chris wasn’t speaking to him or, as far as he could tell, looking at him. Which was fine.

The third day of no evening activity, Brian was supposed to supervise them. But after about ten minutes of flipping through a comic book while Justin tried to avoid staring at him, he threw the comic book down and said, “Fuck this. Let’s go somewhere.”

Chris looked up from his borrowed Gameboy. “Where?” he asked dubiously.

“We’ll go down to the lake,” Brian decided. “Justin, go put your swim trunks on.”

It was dusk, primetime for mosquitoes; Justin got bitten half a dozen times walking through the woods, but it was definitely better to be outside, with Brian loping along in front of him, than to be cooped up in Brian and Chris’s cabin. The crickets scratched loudly, and down closer by the lake they were joined by the bass voices of frogs. The moon was only a sliver, what Justin’s mother called a Cheshire-cat moon. 

Chris hit the water first, and Brian dashed after him and jumped in, but then he treaded water until Justin got there. Chris was away off down the lake. Justin dived in and swam up to Brian, who smiled at him and said, “Race you to the zip line.”

Justin was a better swimmer, but Brian was a lot longer-limbed. Chris had had the same idea and was there before them, climbing up the ladder. Brian gave Justin a hand up. He eyed Justin’s wet body and his mouth went serious, but rather than touch him he stepped back so Justin could get to the ladder. Justin looked him over--his dark hair dripping into his eyes, the beads of water on his smooth chest, the small points of his nipples, his sodden swim trunks not revealing enough. He heard Chris splash into the lake and start swimming, and he turned reluctantly and climbed up to catch the trolley when Chris dragged it back.

He caught the yellow handles of the trolley, held tight, and stepped off the platform (that first step into nothing was always hard), and then he was speeding through the air. The lake rushed up at him and he let go, dropping straight and deep into the cold water. It wasn’t as much fun as tackling Brian to the ground would have been, but it was still fun. He bobbed up, grabbed the end of the long line to drag the trolley, and scissor-kicked back to the shore. After he felt Brian take hold of the trolley, he stayed in the water to watch him come down. Brian held his legs up until the last possible moment before barrelling into the lake.

It was much more satisfactory than riding the zip line during swim class, when you had to wait wet and chilly in a long line every time. Also, Justin didn’t have to talk to or really even look at Chris, who continued to ride down and drag the trolley back in a public-spirited manner over and over. But eventually Justin got bored and overly mosquito-bitten and yelled that he was going to go swim around. He sidestroked lazily for a bit, turned some flips, listened to the periodic splashes of Brian and Chris dropping into the lake. Then he heard a smaller splash, followed by Brian’s low cursing, more splashing, Chris’s bitten-off laugh, long strokes heading toward him. Brian came into view, smacked him on the shoulder, and darted away. 

“You’re it,” he called, swimming farther out of reach.

Justin stayed quiet and swam slowly for a while before making a beeline for the nearest noise, which unfortunately was Chris. He knocked into Chris, yelled “It!” and moved away fast, but Chris caught up with him and clapped him on the shoulder. But when Justin saw his face, he was wearing only a regular smile.

Brian generously conceded defeat after a couple of rounds, probably realizing that neither Chris nor Justin was going to admit to exhaustion. “You got me,” he said to Justin’s rapidly retreating back, and headed toward the pier. “We ought to head back.” Justin changed direction and followed him. When he pulled himself up, Brian was standing on the pier shaking himself off like an Irish setter. Their towels were on the other side of the lake, and the air was no longer warm. Justin could hear Chris swimming away, toward the woods and the towels, and he seized the chance to step behind Brian and put his arms around him, wet head against Brian’s cool back. Brian turned in his arms and pulled Justin’s head against his chest, just briefly, then detached. “Come on,” he said quietly, and Justin followed him down the pier, wishing Chris would evaporate.

Chris had waited for them. “Thanks for letting us out of detention,” he said to Brian, holding out their towels.

“I didn’t do it for you, I was bored out of my skull,” Brian answered, rubbing his hair.

Sure, Justin thought. He noticed Chris falling into step beside Brian for the brief time before the trail got too narrow, and was glad for the first time that Chris was a homophobe and therefore really unlikely to make a pass (or receive one).

By the time all the other campers tromped into the poorly-lit cabin, Justin’s hair was only slightly damp and he and Chris had won nearly all of Brian’s poker chips.

All of Justin’s clothes were filthy, and he was starting to actually miss his mother a little, but he was not ready for camp to be over. He couldn’t stand the thought of not seeing Brian every day--Brian crouched to help a little kid lock in in climbing class, forking pancakes into his mouth at breakfast, looking at him across the gym and then looking away when Justin caught his eye. He *needed* to see Brian. Even though that was about all the Brian-drug he was getting lately, covert glances and the jump of his nerves when Brian walked into the room. He didn’t want to go back to his regular life, with his little sister whining and math homework and Eleanor Ackerman passing him notes and trying to work up the courage to ask him out. Next time she passed him a note he was going to say, “I like you fine, but I’m gay, and I only fuck men.” 

***

During the Counselor Hunt, Brian refused to really hide and instead dragged Michael into the boathouse, which was dark and smelled of mold but was also private and a long way from the gym, where the campers were starting. “Entertain me,” Brian said, lighting a cigarette and leaning against a stack of canoes. “We’ve got to have awhile before they work their way down here.”

Michael took Brian’s cigarette and took a drag. “Well, Veronica dumped Jeff for Ryan, because Veronica and Ryan were on the kayaking trip together and spent the whole car ride talking about Ayn Rand, and then Veronica’s kayak flipped over and got wedged under a rock, so she had to do a wet exit and Ryan was able to score points by tying his kayak to a tree and going back and helping her out.”

“Well, that explains where Ryan was sneaking out to last night.”

“You just let them sneak out?”

“It’s a normal part of the summer camp experience.”

“Speaking of sneaking around, what happened with you and Justin?”

“There is no me and Justin. There never was a me and Justin.”

“Uh huh,” Michael said derisively.

“He’s a nice kid,” Brian conceded, shrugging.

“That’s more than you usually say about your tricks.”

Caleb walked into the boathouse then, followed by the trick. “Oh,” Caleb said. “Hi.”

From Caleb’s lack of enthusiasm and Justin’s clear discomfort, Brian figured he and Michael were probably interrupting a tete a tete. “Mikey and I could go hide somewhere else,” he suggested. Caleb looked startled. 

Justin glared. “No thanks.”

“We don’t mind, do we, Mikey?”

“Not at all,” Mikey said cheerily.

“Uh...okay,” Caleb said.

Ryan came through the door, pulling Veronica behind him. She was giggling and he had lipstick on his cheek.

“Didn’t the hunt just start?” Brian said. “You guys move fast.”

Veronica and Ryan looked around uncomfortably before Justin said, “Look, Caleb and I got here first, so if you don’t care, we’ll take Brian and Michael back to the gym and get the points. And you can...do whatever.”

Ryan assented immediately.

***

Walking away from the gym after dropping Brian and Michael off with the other found counselors, Caleb asked, “So do you think they’re a couple?”

“No,” Justin said shortly. They were passed by two boys of about ten, one of whom was holding onto Eric as though he might escape.

“What, just because Brian’s all--tall, and deep-voiced, and he plays soccer, you think he can’t be gay?”

“I just don’t think they’re a couple, is all.”

“So you do think he’s gay?”

Justin sighed and shook his head. He shouldn’t say anything. He could get Brian in trouble. But it was so fucking tempting. *I don’t THINK he’s gay, I know it a hundred percent.* “He could be.”

“You like him. Don’t you,” Caleb said flatly, watching his face.

“Sure.”

“I mean, you want to fool around with him kind of like him.”

“Yes, he’s a walking wet dream, I noticed.”

Caleb’s eyes narrowed. “Did something happen when you were in the hospital? Did you, like, come on to him and he turned you down?”

“I am so sick of this,” Justin muttered. “Look, you have to promise you won’t tell anyone.”

“Uh, okay.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

“I wasn’t in the hospital. We were in New York. We bought clothes, we had dinner, we fucked all night.”

Caleb stared at him. “No way. I don’t believe you.”

“Fine. Let’s go to the stables and if there’s no one there you can jerk me off.”


	10. Camp

It was the last night of camp. No more being woken up by recorded bugles at the crack of dawn. No more standing in the cold lake waiting to lunge after drowning children. No more hauling straining kids up an extra inch so they could reach the next hold on the climbing wall. No more falling asleep surrounded by the drone of crickets and the heavy, even breathing of tired boys, broken by the occasional boy creeping stealthily along the floor and easing the screen door open. No more Mikey at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, telling Brian the camp gossip and making fun of camp rituals. Back to nights in the backroom of Babylon and pizza dinners cut off by Brian’s need to finish papers, both of which tended to piss Mikey off. 

No more Justin.

Maybe one day he would walk onto the dance floor at Babylon and Justin would be there, dancing and sweaty, glitter in his white-gold hair.

Probably not, though. Probably Justin would find a cute little boyfriend at his preppy private school and then go to college out-of-state somewhere before learning about clubs and baths and anonymous sex. 

Maybe he would go to Columbia or NYU, and when Brian moved to New York after graduation they would run into each other in a club and fuck without even recognizing each other.

Well, Jesus, he hoped he wasn’t going to change that much in four years. Justin would, though. Justin would probably look like a whole different person at nineteen. Maybe his hair would turn brown.

Probably not.

The last night of camp, the counselors were instructed, went the same way every year: award presentation, then sentimental songs, followed by floating of candles in cut-off milk cartons over the lake. For two days the kids had been dropping their little milk cartons in a particular trash can, and the counselors were pressed into cutting the tops off them while they discussed who was getting which award. Brian couldn’t have cared less who got which award, so he kept his mouth shut and listened to the maneuvering, counselors arguing for their favorite campers. Then Eric suggested Chris as MVP for soccer.

“He’s a bad example,” Shauna said. “He got in that fight with that blond kid. Two fights.”

Brian frowned and spoke up, setting down his half-carved milk carton. “He’s the best player. It’s not an award for best example, it’s an award for best player.”

“The awards should encompass sportsmanship as well as skill,” someone said pompously.

“It’s a most valuable player award. He is the most valuable player. And Eric and I are the teachers, so it’s our call,” Brian said. There was some grumbling, but everyone conceded this point.

Justin got an art award. After the debate about Chris, no one offered an objection to that. Anna, the little curly-haired girl, got most improved climber. Veronica got bravest kayaker. Then there was a long debate over who should get honor camper, which basically was a sportsmanship award, but Brian didn’t feel he knew anyone who was even in the running for honor camper, so he didn’t contribute to that discussion. *Most improved cocksucker,* he thought. *Justin. Bravest camper. Probably Justin.* He thought about Justin luring him away from the climbing group, lifting his knees over Brian’s shoulders, answering questions in the emergency room, handing over his sketchbook, kissing Caleb, shrugging off Caleb’s defection, hanging the pictures in the dining hall, socking Chris. *Yeah, probably Justin.*

***

All the counselors were lined up at the front of the gym presenting the awards, while the campers were sitting on the floor in self-selected groups of friends, significant others, sometimes siblings. Justin was sitting near the back with Daphne and Matt. Caleb was sitting between Justin and Andy. Todd called out, “Best climber,” and Justin tensed up, hoping, but it went to Christine Wu, who was, he had to admit, strong and astoundingly flexible. Veronica’s name was called, and Ryan whooped and clapped behind them. Justin looked over at Jeff, who was sitting on the other side of Andy and clapping good-naturedly. Veronica hugged the kayaking teacher, a cute guy Justin didn’t know. Then Michelle, his art teacher, stepped forward.

“Best portraits,” she announced, “Justin Taylor.” Daphne squealed. Justin grinned (yeah, it was stupid, but it was nice to be noticed just the same), hurried up, and took the certificate from Michelle, who squeezed him into a hug. “Keep it up,” she said softly.

“Thanks,” he said, looking toward Brian, who was at the end of the long line. Brian was ducking out.

Instead of going back to Daphne, Justin leaned casually against the side of the gym, and when the next name was called, he slipped out the wide door. Brian was ten feet down the wall, smoking. Justin smiled, just from seeing him there, all studied casualness. He walked up, took hold of Brian’s unoccupied wrist, and tugged at him. “Let’s get out of here.”

Brian shook him off. “Don’t you want to know whether you got honor camper?”

“Yeah, cause that always goes to guys who skip class, skip town, and get into fights.”

“You’re such a rebel.” Brian threw down the cigarette, ground it out with his foot, and looked up with a smirk. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go.”

Croatan was dim, empty, and quiet. Brian threw a sleeping bag on the floor and unzipped it all the way, and Justin peeled it open. Brian pulled Justin to him and started undoing his shorts at the same time as he stuck his tongue in Justin’s mouth. Justin put his hands down the back of Brian’s shorts for a minute, stroking, loving the license, before getting rid of the shorts entirely. When they were both naked Brian stepped back and lay down.

The awards would be finishing up soon. The counselors would start a chorus of sappy songs, and most of the campers would join in. Eventually the gym would fill with a ragged, tearful rendition of “Friends are Friends Forever,” a few good voices soaring clear over the crowd. The girls would all be hugging each other, some of them weeping, and the counselors would rejoin their cabins and hug their campers. Justin had been there many times. This year he was lying on an old sleeping bag, looking down his chest at Brian’s skillful mouth sliding up and down his dick.

Brian scooted up and kissed him. His hair, noticeably longer than it had been when Justin first saw him, was falling in his eyes, and his back was slick with sweat. He moved onto his side and shoved at Justin’s shoulder to get him to turn over. 

“No,” Justin said, and Brian cocked an eyebrow at him. “Do it like this,” Justin elaborated. “Fuck me like this.” It was still difficult to say, but he knew Brian liked it. 

“Turn over first,” Brian said. Justin hesitated, but he did, and he was rewarded by Brian’s tongue tracing a path down his spine, Brian’s lips on the small of his back and the soft skin of his ass. 

Later, when they were face-to-face, Brian lunging into him, both of them close to coming, *I love you* swam to the top of his mind and wouldn’t go away. *I love you,* he thought. *I love you,* and he was trying so hard not to say it, not to ruin this moment by saying it and watching Brian falter, that he started to cry. Just a little, a few tears leaking out.

Brian slowed and hesitated, looking at him. Then he asked, “Happy?” Justin nodded, his throat full. Brian leaned carefully forward and kissed him, kissed his eye, before resuming thrusting. Justin gave his dick a couple more strokes and came with a shudder.

Replete, they lay together, Brian’s head on Justin’s chest, his hand on Justin’s thigh. The campers would be walking up to the shore of the lake now, setting the little candles adrift, and the candles would be spreading out across the dark lake, their reflections multiplying their light. “You want to go back?” Brian asked, lifting his head.

“No.”

“One of us should go act like we’ve been there.”

“You go,” Justin said, at the same time putting a hand in Brian’s hair, wanting to hold him there. Brian sat up and Justin’s hand fell. Brian got up and started putting clothes on.

“Get up and go to bed now,” he said with amusement, “or else I’m going to be leading all the campers in here and you’re going to be asleep on the floor, naked and debauched.”

“Mmmnnnnuh.”

“Bed, now. Go.”

***

Brian loped down to the lake, seeing Justin in his head, spread out on the floor like a fallen angel. He just made it. The sentimental pronouncements were over, and the campers were turning around. The lake was scattered with small lights, like a twinkling Christmas tree in a dark room. Over the heads of the campers, he could see a current carrying some of them faster than the others.

A herd of tiny kids trooped past him, Shauna behind them, and he realized he recognized some of them. Then his own campers, caught up with him, and Mikey grabbed him and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m glad you’re here,” Mikey said into his ear. “Even though you’re a total degenerate.”

No sooner did Michael let him go than Chris punched him on the arm. “Where’ve you been?”

“I hate singing.”

“I kinda like singing,” Chris said with a shrug, before Jamie grabbed him. Probably they had nefarious last night plans to make. Brian put his arm around Michael’s shoulder and headed back.

***

The absolute last thing Justin put in his trunk, when everyone was folding sheets and the showers were running continually to wash off a summer’s worth of grime, was the orange shirt Brian had bought him in New York. Jeff’s father was already dragging his trunk off while Michael hugged Jeff. There was no good reason for Justin to go over to Croatan, but he went anyway, and sat on an empty bunk and watched Brian say awkward goodbyes to campers and parents. Chris’s mother thanked him for taking care of her baby; Chris groaned and hugged Brian. Caleb’s parents dragged him off to show them around. Ryan’s parents arrived with his little brother, but Ryan was MIA. Brian sat down on the bunk right-angled to Justin’s, looking twitchy. Ryan’s parents were carting his stuff off, his mother muttering in annoyance, his little brother complaining that he wanted to go back to Seneca where his friends were. “Your friends are all leaving, too,” his mother pointed out. Brian wasn’t even looking at Justin.

“I’m going to miss you,” Justin said carefully.

“You’ll forget all about me,” Brian said, which at least showed he was listening.

“I will not!” Justin said indignantly.

Ryan’s mother approached. “Do you have any idea where Ryan might be?” she asked with exasperation.

Brian stood up, recommended that they look in Veronica’s cabin, and gave them directions there. He didn’t apologize for letting his campers run wild. It was hard for Justin to imagine him apologizing for anything. He sat back down. He wasn’t looking at Justin, but his knee was almost touching Justin’s. Then he stood up, found a pack of cigarettes, and lit one. Justin couldn’t stand it. Any minute Daphne’s parents would be here to pick him up, and any chance of touching Brian would be gone, and now the room was empty and he was smoking? Justin went over to face him, operating on nothing but want, and when Brian raised his eyebrows Justin touched his waist, sliding his hand under Brian’s T-shirt, and then he moved in, raised up on his toes, and kissed Brian. Brian pulled back, just a little, but Justin persisted and in a few seconds Brian’s tongue moved into his mouth, and Brian’s hands moved down to his ass.

The screen door banged open and Justin turned to see Caleb standing there, mouth open.

Caleb’s parents were followed through the door by Daphne, who called out, “He’s over here!” 

“There you are!” Daphne’s mother said, embracing him. “It’s so good to see you!”

“You, too, Mrs. Chanders,” Justin sighed.

***

Brian made polite chit-chat with Caleb’s parents while Justin disappeared next door to help carry his stuff to the car. Caleb’s mother was wearing a cross. Brian hoped she wouldn’t decide her son was going to hell. Ryan’s family returned en masse, his little brother singing “Ryan and Veronica, sitting in a tree...” Ryan looked about ready to throttle him. 

“Brian, would you mind giving me a hand with this?” Ryan’s father asked, tugging on Ryan’s old wooden army green trunk, off which Justin’s blood had long since been washed. Brian picked up his side effortlessly and followed him out to the SUV.

***

Their trunks were in the back, sleeping bags and pillows and daypacks thrown on top. Daphne’s parents said cordial goodbyes to Michael, and he hugged Justin warmly, perhaps, Justin thought, looking forward to hours alone in the car with Brian. Daphne’s father shut the back of the van.

“Hey, Justin!” Michelle called, hurrying up to the cabin. “I was going to give you these last night, but I couldn’t find you.” She held out his pictures from the cafeteria. 

“Thanks,” he said, startled. 

“I’ll miss you. Keep up with your art, okay?” She hugged him, lemon scented hair brushing his shoulder. He seriously hoped he would eventually get taller than at least most girls.

“I will. Bye.”

“Have a great summer!”

“You, too.” He introduced Michelle to Daphne’s parents, like they cared, and she said she had to get back to her cabin. “Just a minute,” Justin said. “Sorry. I forgot something.” 

Croatan was completely empty. Everyone’s stuff was gone but Brian’s. Justin unlocked his trunk and put the pictures on top. Brian’s charcoal face smirked up at him. There was something not completely right about the mouth, but it was definitely recognizable. He relocked the trunk and looked in the bathroom, just in case, but no one was there. 

“Bye,” he said to the air, then corrected, “Later.”

He slid into the backseat beside Daphne. “You know, I couldn’t find you last night, either,” she said. 

“Did you find it, Justin?” Mrs. Chanders asked.

“Yeah, I got it,” he lied. “Thanks.”

Gravel crunched under the wheels.

***

Once all the parents were gone, Brian stripped off his shirt, because it was a hundred fucking degrees outside and his car was on the other side of the camp. He opened his trunk to throw the shirt in and was confronted with his portrait. Snorting, he picked the drawings up and reconsidered them. 

“Brian, you ready to get the car?”

“Looky what I have,” he said, holding them up.

“He gave them to you?”

“He left them here.” Brian put them back, flat on top and away from the sweaty shirt. “Let’s go.”

“You looking forward to getting back to guys who have to shave?”

“Absolutely,” Brian said. “I hate being worshipped.”

***

Eventually, after Daphne’s parents had gotten the official camp summary, they turned on Cartalk and Justin and Daphne were able, in low voices, to exchange actual information.

“I have to see him again.”

“Of course,” Daphne agreed.

“He goes to Carnegie Mellon. And he says there are these clubs on Liberty Avenue.”

“I’ll go to clubs with you. We can dance and stare at the gorgeous men.” Daphne did a little dance wiggle in her seat.

“We’re going to need fake IDs.”

“We can do that.”

“I’m a crazed stalker.”

“Yeah, but I love you,” she said, leaning her head on his shoulder.

“I just really have to, like, touch him again.”

“I know,” she said. “You will.”


End file.
